Neptune's clouds have nearly disappeared for the first time in three decades. Observations indicate a potential link between the planet's cloud patterns and the solar cycle, despite Neptune's vast distance from the Sun. Ongoing research aims to unravel this mystery. For the first time in nearly t
An image of Neptune taken with the Keck II telescope on June 21, 2023, shows almost no clouds except near the south pole. Credit: Imke de Pater, Erandi Chavez, Erin Redwing /W. M. Keck Observatory’s clouds have nearly disappeared for the first time in three decades. Observations indicate a potential link between the planet’s cloud patterns and the solar cycle, despite Neptune’s vast distance from the Sun. Ongoing research aims to unravel this mystery.
“I was surprised by how quickly clouds disappeared on Neptune,” said Imke de Pater, emeritus professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study. “We essentially saw cloud activity drop within a few months.” “Even four years later, the images we took this past June showed the clouds haven’t returned to their former levels,” said Erandi Chavez, a graduate student at Harvard University’s Center for Astrophysics who led the study when she was an undergraduate astronomy student at UC Berkeley. “This is extremely exciting and unexpected, especially since Neptune’s previous period of low cloud activity was not nearly as dramatic and prolonged.
This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images chronicles the waxing and waning of the amount of cloud cover on Neptune. This nearly-30-year-long set of observations shows that the number of clouds grows increasingly following a peak in the solar cycle – where the Sun’s level of activity rhythmically rises and falls over an 11-year period. The Sun’s level of ultraviolet radiation is plotted in the vertical axis. The 11-year cycle is plotted along the bottom from 1994 to 2022.
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