Astronomers announced a sudden and unexpected disappearance of the clouds of the planet Neptune, which puzzled them, according to the British newspaper “The Independent”.
A new study revealed that an abundance of clouds that were seen, years ago, on the planet Neptune have almost disappeared, and have ceased to exist since 2019.
Pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and published by the US Space Agency (NASA), dated the sequence of the dwindling amount of cloud cover on Neptune.
The study, recently published in the journal Icarus, suggests a possible link between the disappearance of giant clouds and the solar cycle.
Scientists say that this connection between the vanishing clouds of Neptune and the solar cycle is “surprising”, given that the planet is the most distant large planet in the solar system, and receives only 1/900 of the sunlight that Earth gets.
In this regard, study co-author Emke de Pater of the University of California stated:
I was surprised at how quickly the clouds on Neptune were disappearing. We’ve basically seen cloud activity drop in just a few months. Our findings support the theory that the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, when strong enough, may trigger a photochemical reaction that results in Neptune’s clouds.
