New Discovery Reveals Why Uranus and Neptune Are Different Colors
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft captured these views of Uranus (on the left) and Neptune (on the right) during its flybys of the planets in the 1980s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/B. Jónsson
Observations from Gemini Observatory and other telescopes reveal that excess haze on Astronomers may now understand why the similar planets Uranus and Neptune have distinctive hues. Researchers constructed a single atmospheric model that matches observations of both planets using observations from the Gemini North telescope, the
The planets Neptune and Uranus have much in common — they have similar masses, sizes, and atmospheric compositions — yet their appearances are notably different. At visible wavelengths Neptune has a distinctly bluer color whereas Uranus is a pale shade of cyan. Astronomers now have an explanation for why the two planets are different colors.
New research suggests that a layer of concentrated haze that exists on both planets is thicker on Uranus than a similar layer on Neptune and ‘whitens’ Uranus’s appearance more than Neptune’s.[1] If there were no haze in the atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus, both would appear almost equally blue.[2]
This conclusion comes from a model[3] that an international team led by Patrick Irwin, Professor of Planetary Physics at Oxford University, developed to describe aerosol layers in the atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus.[4] Previous investigations of…
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