If you ask experts on this issue, what colors are Neptune And Uranus, most likely, the answer will be “dark blue” and “greenish”, respectively. However, new research from the University of Oxford shows that the two ice giants are much more similar in color than previously thought. After all, they both really blue-green tone.
It has long been known that most modern images of the two planets do not accurately reflect their true colors. Their distinction made no sense since both worlds were very similar. They are almost the same size and are surrounded by a deep atmosphere consisting of similar elements.
The first detailed views were made possible thanks to NASA’s Voyager 2 probe, which flew past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to approach both planets. The original confusion arose because the captured images were published in different colors.
Photos of Uranus were processed close to their true color. But the images of Neptune were tampered with to better show some aspects of its atmosphere. This changed its color, making it an artificial dark blue. “They did what I think everyone on Instagram would have done at some point in their life: they changed the colors,” explained Katherine Heymans, professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh. BBC.
New “revelation” of photos of Uranus and Neptune
The researchers in the new study used data from the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). They also took advantage of the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Observer (MUSE) of the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). In both instruments Each pixel represents a continuous spectrum of colors. This means that observations can be unambiguously processed to determine the true apparent colors of Uranus and Neptune.
The team used all this data to balance the images taken by Voyager 2 with others taken by Hubble. So they saw that Uranus and Neptune actually have a fairly similar blue-green tone. The main difference is that Neptune has a slight shade of blue. As the model shows, this is due to a thinner layer of haze on this planet.
The study report explains that Uranus is slightly lighter because its atmosphere is somewhat “stagnant and slow.” This results in a methane haze that reflects the red portions of sunlight more than Neptune does.
“We were able to recreate the most accurate representation of the colors of Neptune and Uranus to date,” Patrick Irvine, a researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, said in a statement. The study also found that Uranus appears slightly greener in the summer and winter when one of its poles points toward the Sun, and bluer in the spring and fall when the Sun is above the equator.
New space technologies are changing the understanding of our solar system. The James Webb Space Telescope recently revealed a new portrait of Uranus, revealing its often invisible rings and some hidden features of its atmosphere.
Source: Hiper Textual
