Patrick IrwinThe photos of the two planets, with real colors below
NOS News•today, 02:02•Changed today, 02:44
Anyone who thought that the planet Neptune has a deep blue color has been quite fooled in recent years. Researchers from Britain’s University of Oxford have discovered that the planet is much more similar to its neighbor planet Uranus, which is more green-blue. They have released images of the discovery.
The American space probe Voyager 2 has so far been the only probe to fly past Uranus and Neptune, the two outer planets of our solar system. The photos that Voyager 2 took in the 1980s and transmitted to Earth were recorded in separate colors. Then all the photos were combined.
The photos of Uranus that we all know were close to the real colors, but those of Neptune were artificially made “too blue”, the researchers say. In addition, the photos had been edited so that the clouds and winds were clearly visible. This was well known among astronomers and was also explained in the photo captions. Over time, however, that nuance has been lost, the researchers say.
Now it turns out that Neptune and Uranus are very similar in color. Neptune is slightly bluer, according to the researchers due to a thinner vapor layer on that planet.
Voyager 2
For the study, the researchers used data from the Voyager 2 probe, the Hubble space telescope and the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.
Uranus and Neptune are two ice giants and are the farthest of all planets from the sun. Uranus about 2.9 billion kilometers and Neptune about 4.5 billion kilometers. They are about the same size.
The Voyager 2 probe was launched on August 20, 1977 and is still flying through space, now outside the solar system. The probe is according to by NASA more than 20 billion kilometers from Earth. Light from the sun takes almost 19 hours to reach Voyager 2. The American Space Agency is still in contact with it.
2024-01-06 01:02:02
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