Tag Archive for 'Neptune'

An artist’s impression of a trans-Neptunian object. Image credit: NASA / ESA / G. Bacon, STScI.

Newly-Discovered Trans-Neptunian Object is Moving in Rhythm with Neptune, Astronomers Say

Jul 17, 2025 by News Staff

Discovered by the Large inclination Distant Objects (LiDO) survey and designated 2020 VN40, this trans-Neptunian object is the first confirmed body that...

This composite image, made using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, shows auroral activity (cyan splotches) on Neptune. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Heidi Hammel, AURA / Henrik Melin, Northumbria University / Leigh Fletcher, University of Leicester / Stefanie Milam, NASA-GSFC.

Webb Detects Trihydrogen, Captures Aurorae on Neptune for First Time

Mar 26, 2025 by News Staff

Emissions from the upper-atmospheric trihydrogen cation (H3+) have been used to study the global-scale interactions of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus with...

Hubble observed Saturn on June 20, 2019 as the planet made its closest approach to Earth this year, at approximately 808 million miles away. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / M.H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / OPAL Team.

Saturn’s Rings May Be as Old as the Gas Giant Itself: Study

Dec 17, 2024 by News Staff

Saturn’s icy rings could be much older than they appear due to their resistance to pollution from impacts with rocky debris. Hyodo et al. suggest that...

From 2014 to 2024, Hubble has been studying Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune under the OPAL program. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Simon, NASA-GSFC / M.H. Wong, UC Berkeley / J. DePasquale, STScI.

Hubble’s OPAL Program Celebrates Decade of Tracking Solar System’s Giant Planets

Dec 10, 2024 by News Staff

The OPAL (Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy) program obtains long-term baseline observations of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in order to understand...

The discovery image of the Uranian moon S/2023 U1 using the Magellan telescope on November 4, 2023. Image credit: Scott Sheppard.

Astronomers Discover New Moons around Uranus and Neptune

Feb 26, 2024 by News Staff

The three newly-discovered moons — S/2023 U1, S/2002 N5 and S/2021 N1 — are the faintest ever found around Uranus and Neptune using ground-based...

Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to determine the best estimate of the true colors of these planets. Image credit: Irwin et al., doi: 10.1093/mnras/stad3761.

Uranus and Neptune Are in Fact Similar Shade of Greenish Blue, New Color-Corrected Images Reveal

Jan 5, 2024 by News Staff

Uranus and Neptune, the so-called ice giants, are the most distant giant planets in our Solar System. Our knowledge of these worlds was revolutionized...

An artist’s impression of the giant exoplanet Kepler-1704b. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Neptune-Mass Exoplanet around Ultracool Dwarf Star Challenges Current Theories of Planet Formation

Nov 30, 2023 by Natali Anderson

Current theories predict that low-mass stars should rarely host planets with masses exceeding that of Neptune (17 Earth masses). An artist’s impression...

This image from the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows Neptune; a dark spot can be seen to the upper-right. Image credit: ESO / Irwin et al.

VLT Observes Large Dark Spot and Its Bright Companion in Atmosphere of Neptune

Aug 24, 2023 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s...

This sequence of Hubble images chronicles the waxing and waning of the amount of cloud cover on Neptune. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Erandi Chavez, UC Berkeley / Imke de Pater, UC Berkeley.

Astronomers Discover Connection between Neptune’s Cloudy Weather and 11-Year Solar Cycle

Aug 17, 2023 by News Staff

Neptune is the most distant planet in the Solar System, an ice-giant that boasts an active and chaotic atmosphere. Using archival near-infrared observations...

An artist’s concept of a Neptunian Trojan asteroid. Image credit: NASA / ESA / G. Bacon, STScI / C. Fuentes, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Neptunian Trojan Asteroids Exist in Broad Spectrum of Red Color, Astronomers Find

Mar 29, 2023 by News Staff

Neptunian Trojans are trans-Neptunian objects in 1:1 mean-motion resonance with the ice giant Neptune. These asteroids are generally thought to have been...

This image, taken with Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), shows Neptune, its dusty rings, and seven moons. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI.

Webb Focuses on Neptune, Its Moons and Ring System

Sep 21, 2022 by News Staff

NASA has released beautiful photos taken by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope of the ice giant Neptune, its dusty rings, and seven moons. This...

Composite of a true color image of Saturn, observed by Cassini in 2016, overlaid with a false color representation of the ultraviolet aurora in the northern hemisphere as observed on August 20, 2017. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute / A. Bader, Lancaster University.

Destroyed Moon Could Explain Saturn’s Young Rings and Present-Day Tilt

Sep 16, 2022 by News Staff

Saturn’s rings — thought to have formed a mere 100 million years ago — are one of the most distinctive planetary features in our Solar System....

This diagram shows three layers of aerosols in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune. The height scale on the diagram represents the pressure above 10 bar. The deepest layer (Aerosol-1 layer) is thick and composed of a mixture of hydrogen sulfide ice and particles produced by the interaction of the planets’ atmospheres with sunlight. The key layer that affects the colors is the middle layer, which is a layer of haze particles (Aerosol-2 layer) that is thicker on Uranus than on Neptune. Irwin et al. suspect that, on both planets, methane ice condenses onto the particles in this layer, pulling the particles deeper into the atmosphere in a shower of methane snow. Because Neptune has a more active, turbulent atmosphere than Uranus does, the team believes Neptune’s atmosphere is more efficient at churning up methane particles into the haze layer and producing this snow. This removes more of the haze and keeps Neptune’s haze layer thinner than it is on Uranus, meaning the blue color of Neptune looks stronger. Above both of these layers is an extended layer of haze (Aerosol-3 layer) similar to the layer below it but more tenuous. On Neptune, large methane ice particles also form above this layer. Image credit: Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / J. da Silva / NASA / JPL-Caltech / B. Jónsson.

Haze Layers are Responsible for Different Blue Hues of Neptune and Uranus, Scientists Say

Jun 1, 2022 by News Staff

An international team of planetary researchers led by University of Oxford scientists has performed an analysis of visible/near-infrared observations of...

Neptune is Cooler than Astronomers Thought

Apr 11, 2022 by News Staff

Using data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the Subaru Telescope, the Keck Telescope, the Gemini South and North...

Hubble’s photo of Jupiter displays the ever-changing landscape of its turbulent atmosphere. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Amy Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Michael H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / Joseph DePasquale, STScI.

Hubble Observes Solar System’s Giant Planets

Nov 19, 2021 by News Staff

Hubble’s snapshots of the outer Solar System’s planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — reveal both extreme and subtle changes...

Hydrogen atoms diffuse easily between the superionic and the liquid phases. The liquid-fcc superionic interface of a water system with 20,736 atoms at 100 GPa and 3,250 K (on the melting curve) is shown. The oxygen atoms are red and the hydrogen atoms are white. The yellow, green and blue lines show the trajectories of three hydrogen atoms during a 75 ps molecular dynamics simulation run. Image credit: Cheng et al., doi: 10.1038/s41567-021-01334-9.

Physicists Study Superionic Water’s Phase Behaviors

Sep 28, 2021 by News Staff

Using machine learning, a team of physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has studied the phase behaviors of superionic water — a phase...

This picture of Neptune was produced from the last whole planet images taken through the green and orange filters on the narrow angle camera of NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft. The images were taken at a range of 7.1 million km (4.4 million miles) from the planet, 4 days and 20 hours before closest approach. The picture shows the Great Dark Spot and its companion bright smudge; on the west limb the fast moving bright feature called Scooter and the little dark spot are visible. These clouds were seen to persist for as long as Voyager’s cameras could resolve them. North of these, a bright cloud band similar to the south polar streak may be seen. Image credit: NASA / JPL.

ALMA Detects Hydrogen Cyanide Belt in Stratosphere of Neptune

May 21, 2021 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have produced a detailed map of intensity and abundance of gaseous hydrogen cyanide...

Solar system distances to scale, showing 2018 AG37 compared to other known solar system objects, including the previous record holder 2018 VG18. Image credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa / Scott S. Sheppard, Carnegie Institution for Science / Brooks Bays, University of Hawai’i.

Solar System’s Most Distant Object Confirmed

Feb 11, 2021 by News Staff

Nicknamed ‘Farfarout’ and officially designated 2018 AG37, the newly-confirmed planetoid has a very elongated orbit that takes it out to 175 AU (astronomical...

This Hubble image of the dynamic blue-green planet Neptune reveals a huge dark storm (top center) and the emergence of a smaller dark spot nearby (top right). The giant vortex, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, was traveling south toward certain doom by atmospheric forces at the equator when it suddenly made a U-turn and began drifting back northward. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) captured this visible-light image on January 7, 2020, the same time a slightly smaller dark spot mysteriously appeared nearby. That spot then vanished a few months later. The smaller feature may have been a piece of the giant storm that broke off as the larger vortex approached the equator. The large storm is the fourth transient dark spot Hubble has observed since 1993. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft first imaged two dark features in Neptune’s southern hemisphere in 1989 as Voyager flew by the distant planet. Those storms had disappeared by the time Hubble looked at Neptune in 1994. However, Hubble detected two new dark spots in the planet’s northern hemisphere in 1994 and 1996. Image credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / M.H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / L.A. Sromovsky & P.M. Fry, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Hubble Monitors Weird Dark Vortex on Neptune

Dec 16, 2020 by News Staff

In 2018, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope spotted a giant dark storm, which is 7,400 km (4,600 miles) across, in the northern hemisphere...

A whimsical view of the planets of our Solar System and the missions sent from Earth to explore them. Image credit: Jenny Mottar / NASA.

Astronomers Discover New ‘Celestial Autobahn’ in Solar System

Dec 9, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers from Serbia and the United States has discovered a new superhighway network to travel through our Solar System much...

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