The Most Detailed Images of Uranus' Atmosphere Ever 105
New submitter monkeyhybrid writes "The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla reports on the most detailed images of Uranus ever taken. The infrared sensitivity of the ground based Keck II telescope's NIRC2 instrument enabled astronomers to see below the high level methane based atmosphere that has hampered previous observations, and with unprecedented clarity. If you ever thought Uranus was a dull blue looking sphere then look again; you could easily mistake these images for being of Jupiter!"
#insert "YourAnusJoke.h" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So how really do they account for the swirling (Score:5, Interesting)
I am curious to know as well, since uranus has complex rotation. (It rotates on 2 axies; one roughly parallel to the solar ecliptic, and one perpendicular to it.) The coriolis effects would favor the first axis, but would still be influenced by the second.
Other interesting things would be the impact of solar heating due to its unusual angle of primary rotation. I can imagine very strange liquid gas ocean currents on the surface. (If not liquid, at least supercritical) the actual rocky body core inside probably has some very unique features from the erosion of the highspeed, high pressure atmosphere.
It really is a shame that we would have to make probes of pure unobtanium to exlore anything other than the atmospheres of the gas giants. I would love to see the remnants of the impact crater from the impact that knocked uranus into such an obscure rotation, or to see how such a dense and high velocity atmosphere erodes and reshapes the rocky body beneath.
Voyager (Score:5, Interesting)
Too bad Voyager didn't have the right IR filters when it flew by. It only found a hazy globe with slight wispyness. I was disappointed with the Uranus pics from Voyager (although its moons were more photogenic).
I was pleasantly surprised to see Neptune had visible features for Voyager. [wikipedia.org]
I truly expected it to be bland like Uranus, and one day I was walking past the newsstand after an intense college exam and spotted a big photo of a beautiful blue planet on the front page with wispy spots and storms. At first I thought it was a sci-fi movie ad.
And then it suddenly hit me: Voyager! Neptune! Wow! A great de-stresser after an exam. It's a "geek moment" I'll never forget. It was so new and foreign and spooky and fscking beautiful!
Re:So how really do they account for the swirling (Score:5, Interesting)
I would love to see the remnants of the impact crater from the impact that knocked uranus into such an obscure rotation
Recent models of the solar system's evolution can't account for objects as massive and Uranus and Neptune forming so far from the Sun. The idea is the actually formed much closer and were pushed outward.
The mechanism for this event is proposed to have been a 2:1 orbital resonance between Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter moved inwards and the other large planets moved outwards, possible causing Uranus' odd axial tilt in the process. This model also proposed that Neptune was originally closer to the Sun than Uranus, but swapped places during the disruptive event. This model makes sense of why Neptune is more massive than Uranus.
An direct impact event would have to have involved something very large to affect such a massive body (14.5 earth masses) so radically. That seems unlikely.