Neptune is way, way out there, orbiting the Sun some 2.8 billion miles away. That’s likely why a new analysis of some old photos of the ice giant have just revealed something a bit funny: We’ve been wrong about what it looked like all along.
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00:00Neptune is way, way out there, orbiting the sun some 2.8 billion miles away.
00:09And that's likely why a new analysis of some old photos of the ice giant have just
00:13revealed something a bit funny.
00:14We've been wrong about what it looked like all along.
00:17The new revelation stems from a simple query by astronomers.
00:20Why do Neptune and Uranus look so different, given the atmospheric situation on both planets
00:25is nearly identical?
00:26So researchers reprocessed photos taken from Voyager 2 back in the day and used new images
00:31via Hubble and the Very Large Telescope's multi-unit spectroscopic explorer to confirm
00:36it.
00:37And sure enough, Neptune appears to be a near-identical twin to Uranus.
00:40So what happened when they first processed the photos?
00:42Here's what planetary scientist Patrick Irwin had to say about that.
00:46Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to
00:50true color, those of Neptune were in fact stretched and enhanced, and therefore made
00:54artificially too blue.
00:56The instrumentation on Voyager 2 actually took photos of the two planets in different
01:00color bands, meaning when processed, Neptune's contrast was emphasized.
01:04This deepened its hue, producing the images we've previously been more familiar with.