An international team of astronomers have used ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), to track Neptune's atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period. They found a surprising drop in Neptune's global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole.
"This change was unexpected," says Michael Roman, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Leicester, UK, and lead author of the study published today in."Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we expected temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder."
Observed changes in Neptune's thermal-infrared brightness, a measure of temperature in Neptune's atmosphere. The plot shows the relative change in the thermal-infrared brightness from Neptune's stratosphere with time for all existing images taken by ground-based telescopes. Brighter images are interpreted as warmer. Corresponding thermal-infrared images at wavelengths of ~12 µm show Neptune's appearance in 2006, 2009, 2018 , and 2020 .
"Our data cover less than half of a Neptune season, so no one was expecting to see large and rapid changes," says co-author Glenn Orton, senior research scientist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.infrared light
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