Since Voyager 2 blew by in 1986 around Uranus and the year 1989 around Neptune and took detailed portraits of them along the way, astronomers wondered why the two planets—extremely similar in most respects—had such strikingly different colors, the server recalls Science Alert.
New research has revealed the true colours of some of our Solar System’s gas giants. Whilst images from Voyager 2 in the 1980s depicted the Uranus and Neptune as green and a rich blue respectively, UK astronomers have revealed their real colours: pic.twitter.com/KmBLQ46rKh
— The Royal Society (@royalsociety) January 5, 2024
In a new study, published in December 2023 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (the so-called monthly review of the British Royal Astronomical Society), astronomers surprisingly showed that the planets are very similar in color and have a light greenish-blue hue.
The unrealistic depiction of the planets once arose due to the use of color filters that were supposed to highlight some details on their surface.
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“There is a slight difference in the shade of blue between Uranus and Neptune, but the word slight is important,” the paper quoted The New York Times Leigh Fletcher, an astronomer from the University of Leicester in the UK. According to him, the results of the new research will help “put things into perspective”.
Common image color adjustments
Neptune used to be depicted as dark blue and Uranus as greenish-blue, while the images of the planets were taken by the Voyager 2 probe when it flew past them in the 1980s. However, the photographs of both ice giants were adjusted especially in terms of color saturation at the time of their creation to make some of them clearer details.
“At the time of its creation, it was known among planetary scientists that the color saturation was artificially manipulated and the images were released with a note noting this, but awareness of this has faded over time,” he explained, according to the news station BBC research team leader Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford.
The rings of the planet Uranus are no longer hidden. The Webb Telescope offers a new, detailed view
Color manipulation of images of space objects is common, and is done to make the photos more visible to the human eye.
The shade of Uranus changes depending on the season
Newly, astronomers used the spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope and images from giant telescopes in Chile to get an accurate idea of the colors of Neptune and Uranus.
Among other things, they read from them that the color of the planet Uranus changes slightly depending on the season, and the planet has a greener hue when one of its poles is tilted closer to the Sun.
NASA is already communicating normally with the Voyager probe, the antenna is in the correct position
2024-01-09 15:25:25
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