Neptune is known for its rich blue and Uranus for its green – but a new study reveals that the two ice giants are actually much more similar in color than previously thought.
The correct color of the planet has been confirmed with the help of research led by Professor Patrick Irwin of the University of Oxford, which was published yesterday (6/1) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
He and his team discovered that both worlds actually have a similar blue-green color, although it is a common belief that Neptune is dark blue and Uranus has a pale cyan appearance.
Astronomers have long known that most modern images of the two planets do not accurately reflect their true colors.
This misconception arose because images taken of the two planets in the 20th century – including by NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, the only spacecraft to fly by both planets – recorded images in different colors.
The single-color images are then recombined to produce a composite color image, which is not always accurately balanced to produce a “true” color image, and – especially in the case of Neptune – is often rendered “too blue.”
Also Read: Neptune and Uranus Have the Same Color! NASA’s Voyager 2 Captured This Amazing Fact
Additionally, Voyager 2’s early images of Neptune were enhanced with strong contrast to better reveal the clouds, bands, and winds that shape our modern perspective of Neptune.
“Even though Voyager 2’s known images of Uranus were published in a form that approximates its ‘true’ color, the images of Neptune are, in fact, stretched and enlarged, and therefore artificially made too blue,” said Professor Irwin.
“While artificially saturated colors were known at the time among planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining them – the differences have been lost over time.”
“By applying our model to real data, we have been able to reconstruct the most accurate representation of the colors of Neptune and Uranus.”
In this new study, researchers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. In both instruments, each pixel is a continuous color spectrum.
This means that STIS and MUSE observations can be processed clearly to determine the true colors of Uranus and Neptune.
The researchers used this data to rebalance composite color images recorded by Voyager 2’s camera, and also by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
2024-01-07 01:13:00
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