Captured by the James Webb telescope showing the planet Neptune’s fresh glow. Image: Astrology.co.au
SPACE — On Thursday, August 17, 2023, astronomers announced an unexpected update about one of our solar system’s ice giants, Neptune. It seemed that the blue world cloud had disappeared. A paper on the findings appears in the November issue of the journal Icarus.
Basically, after looking at images taken of the planet between the eighth years of 1994 and 2022, the team noticed a strange pattern starting in 2019. Around the planet’s mid-latitudes, cloud cover appears to start to fade. Finally, all the evidence points to the complete disappearance of the clouds.
“I was surprised how quickly the clouds on Neptune dissipated. Basically, we saw a decrease in cloud activity in a few months.”
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said Imke de Pater, an emeritus professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley and senior author of the study on the findings.
Intrigued by this discovery, de Pater and fellow researchers decided to dig deeper. Of course, they provide a pretty interesting explanation, namely that Neptune’s clouds are closely related to the way the sun behaves during its 11-year activity cycle.
Is it really the Sun’s Fault?
The solar cycle basically refers to the way the magnetic field of our host star changes over time, particularly over 11 years. Despite what it looks like, the sun is not a scorching lump of land. Instead, it is a giant spherical ocean made of charged particles collectively known as plasma.
That means the structure of the sun can generally flow and shape itself over time. Due to this movement, the sun’s magnetic field, which is directly related to all the charged particles, gets tangled.
As these fields get tangled, they exert more and more tension on our star, until the yellow glowing ball can’t handle it anymore. Then, every 11 years, the sun does a kind of reset, in which its magnetic field reverses. That is, the north pole becomes the south pole and vice versa. From there, the cycle repeats itself.
However, during those 11 years, other things also happened due to changes in the magnetic field. For example, a knot in the magnetic field causes an increase in the number and intensity of solar flares, which are very powerful releases of radiation into outer space.
These flares can sometimes be so strong, they even disrupt satellites orbiting the Earth. They are also frequently associated with giant eruptions of solar plasma known as coronal mass ejections. These eruptions can shower our planet with charged particles creating temporary mini-blips in communication lines.
But the most important thing that Neptune’s team had to analyze was one phenomenon that occurs during the solar cycle, where it emits a lot of ultraviolet radiation as its magnetic field transitions. According to the researchers, the massiveness of the sun makes such radiation flood the rest of the solar system. Of course it makes sense that the whole situation could affect a planet or two, including Neptune, even though the windy planet is located some 4.5 billion kilometers from our beloved star.
Where did Neptune’s clouds go?
To dissect where Neptune’s clouds went, the research team collected 30 years of images of Neptune taken by powerful observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the WM Keck Observatory located in Hawaii. Researchers found that there is a clear correlation between the amount of clouds on Neptune and the point at which our solar cycle occurs.
More specifically, roughly two years after the peak of the magnetic field reversal cycle, Neptune exhibits dense cloud cover. After that peak, Neptune’s clouds appear to fade above the planet’s atmosphere of hydrogen, helium and methane. To note, the methane content is what makes Neptune look so blue.
Potentially, this means the sun’s peak UV radiation, perhaps driving a photochemical reaction, which is triggered by the absorption of energy in the form of light to produce Neptune’s cloudy cap. It’s likely that the reaction took about two years to take effect, and that explains why after two years of solar peak, the team had only recently witnessed an abundance of Neptune’s clouds.
“This extraordinary data gives us the strongest evidence that Neptune’s cloud cover is correlated with solar cycles,” said de Pater.
Furthermore, the team noticed that the more clouds there are in a blue world, the brighter it is. That’s because more sunlight is reflected from these clouds.
“The potential correlation of Neptune’s brightness variations with seasonal changes and solar activity cycles has been explored, but so far no single cause has been identified. While seasonal effects play an important role in slow, gradual changes, secular brightness variations must have a different origin,” the study authors wrote. in their paper.
To be clear, these results are a consequence of looking at the 2.5 cycles of cloud activity recorded over the three decades of observations of Neptune by the research team. During this time, researchers say that the planet’s reflectivity increased in 2002, dimmed in 2007, brightened again in 2015, then darkened in 2020, when the clouds appear to have completely disappeared.
“Even now, four years later, the latest image we took last June 2023 still shows the clouds have not returned to their original level. This is very interesting and unexpected, especially because Neptune’s previous periods of low cloud activity were not as dramatic and prolonged,” said
Erandi Chavez, a graduate student at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard-Smithsonian and leader of the research.
It’s actually quite surprising that all of these changes are clearly visible in the images the research team took. “It’s very exciting to be able to use telescopes on Earth to study the world’s climate more than 2.5 billion miles away from us,” said Carlos Alvarez, an astronomer at the Keck Observatory and one of the authors of the study.
In the future, Alvarez and colleagues will continue to monitor Neptune’s cloud activity to see when these cirrus-shaped features reappear. In fact, over the last few years, as the sun’s UV rays have increased quite a bit, they have seen the appearance of clouds.
“We’ve seen more clouds in the new Keck image taken at the same time NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was observing the planet. These clouds were particularly visible at northern latitudes and at high altitudes, as would be expected from the observed increase in flux UV sun for the last two years or so,” de Pater said.
Therefore, Neptune has nothing to worry about. Because, the cloud will return in time. Source: Space.com
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2023-08-18 14:36:58
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