Neptune’s temperature is changing in ways that scientists don’t understand, and it could take decades to figure out what’s happening.
). The researchers used infrared light to pierce Neptune’s top cloud layer and peer at its stratosphere, where the planet’s atmospheric chemistry comes into view.
Each Neptune year lasts 165 Earth years, so the time period analyzed — from 2003 to 2020 — is essentially equivalent to five weeks on Earth. The wildest temperature shift occurred from 2018 to 2020, when the atmospheric temperature at Neptune’s south pole rose from –121° C to –110° C.These mid-infrared images from the Very Large Telescope in Cerro Paranal, Chile, and the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, show thermal snapshots of Neptune from 2006 to 2020.
The researchers don’t yet know what’s causing the temperature changes. The sun’s ultraviolet rays break up methane molecules in the stratosphere, so that chemistry or even the sun’s activity cycle could be a trigger. Nailing down specifics requires more observations. “We need to keep observing over the next 20 years to see a full season and see if something else changes,” says Rowe-Gurney.
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