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The Most Detailed Images of Uranus' Atmosphere Ever
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!"
Forthcoming... Joke...
Preemptive "stop it, you immature clod."
I can't lie, as soon as I saw the headline "Most detailed image of Uranus..." on my FB feed, I began chuckling to myself. I know, I'm a child.
If you click any links in the comments for this article, you deserve it.
I love astronomy, but I literally read this on my phone whilst sitting on the toilet. I know the jokes are going to run rampant, so can we perhaps start an intelligent conversation about the utility and practicality of probing or mining the heavier elements below Uranus's hazy methane cloud? Oh wait...damn.
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
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.
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!
Table-ized A.I.
They really have to change that planet's name.
Etymology:
It was originally called "Georgium Sidus" after King George III, but since no one liked that name a bunch of unofficial alternatives were thought up. Uranus eventually won out and even became official in 1850. Uranus being the Latinized version of the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos. Bode argued that just as Saturn was the father of Jupiter, the new planet should be named after the father of Saturn. In 1789, Bode's Royal Academy colleague Martin Klaproth named his newly discovered element "uranium" in support of Bode's choice.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Those dirty rings. You've tried soaking, scrubbing, and you still end up with (singing) Ring Around Uranus!
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I strongly recommend not clicking on parent's link...
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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.)
I think you're a little confused here because I haven't been able to find any source for what you write. Yes, there are times that one or the other poles points toward the Sun and times that the Sun is over the equator, but that doesn't have anything to do with Uranus rotating on two axes. It's just that it's lying on its side relative to its orbit so different parts of it point toward the Sun at various times.
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(It rotates on 2 axies; one roughly parallel to the solar ecliptic, and one perpendicular to it.)
For one, the rotation due to orbiting around the Sun is a little over 40,000 times slower. So the contributions of that to any Coriolis forces would also be about 40,000 times weaker than the rotation of the planet. Second, things like the Coriolis effect only really care about the total rotation of the frame you are talking about. So the angular velocities of the rotation of the planet and orbit would combine to have just a single angular velocity vector that results in a single Coriolis force. The break down into revolutions and orbits would be just two components of a single rotation.
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.
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