Neptune’s disappearing clouds linked to the solar cycle | Science & Technology

This discovery is based on three decades of Neptune observations captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, as well as data from the Lick Observatory in California.

The link between Neptune and solar activity is surprising to planetary scientists because Neptune is our solar system’s farthest major planet and receives sunlight with about 0.1% of the intensity Earth receives. Yet Neptune’s global cloudy weather seems to be driven by solar activity, and not the planet’s four seasons, which each last approximately 40 years.

At present, the cloud coverage seen on Neptune is extremely low, with the exception of some clouds hovering over the giant planet’s south pole. A University of California (UC) Berkeley-led team of astronomers discovered that the abundance of clouds normally seen at the icy giant’s mid-latitudes started to fade in 2019.

“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,” she said.

“Even now, four years later, the most recent images we took this past June still show the clouds haven’t returned to their former levels,” said Erandi Chavez, a graduate student at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard-Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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.”

To monitor the evolution of Neptune’s appearance, Chavez and her team analyzed Keck Observatory images taken from 2002 to 2022, the Hubble Space Telescope archival…

Ad Amazon : The reality of UFOs and extraterrestrials is here for those with the courage to examine it. We are not alone! We are only one of many different humanoids in a universe teeming with other intelligent life?