The most distant planet in our Solar System has presented a new mystery. Astronomers who have observed Neptune over the past 17 years with multiple ground-based telescopes have tracked a surprising drop in the ice giant’s global temperatures, which was followed by a dramatic warming trend at the planet’s south pole.
Neptune, which orbits the Sun at a distance of 4.5 billion kilometers, experiences seasons like Earth – they last much longer.
A year on Neptune lasts about 165 Earth years, so a single season can last about 40 years. It has been summer in Neptune’s southern hemisphere since 2005.
Astronomers set out to track the planet’s atmospheric temperatures as soon as the southern summer solstice occurred that year.
Nearly 100 thermal images of Neptune taken since then have shown that much of Neptune has gradually cooled, falling by 8°C between 2003 and 2018. A study of the phenomenon published Monday in the Planetary Science Journal.
“This change was unexpected,” the study’s lead author, Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, said in a statement.
“Since we observed Neptune during early summer in the south, we expected temperatures to get warmer, not cooler.”
Then, a dramatic warming event occurred at Neptune’s south pole between 2018 and 2020 and temperatures rose by 11°C. This hot polar vortex completely reversed any cooling that had gone before. This kind of polar heating has never been seen on Neptune until now.
More observations will be needed to truly explore these possibilities. The James Webb Space Telescope will observe Uranus and Neptune later this year. The space observatory’s mid-infrared instrument can map the chemistry and temperatures in Neptune’s atmosphere and identify what caused the change.
Neptune is more than 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth, and it is the only planet in our solar system that is not visible to the naked eye from Earth. So far, only NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has flown closely by Neptune, which it did in 1989.
“I think Neptune is very intriguing to many of us because we still know so little about it,” said Roman. “All this points to a more complicated picture of Neptune’s atmosphere and how it changes over time.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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