During millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was nothing more than a distant star. It was not until the end of the 18th century that Uranus was universally accepted as a planet. To this day, the world ringed and blue subverts the expectations of scientists, but NASA’s new research helps to disconnect part of the mystique of the world.
During millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was nothing more than a distant star. It was not until the end of the 18th century that Uranus was universally accepted as a planet. To this day, the world ringed and blue subverts the expectations of scientists, but NASA’s new research helps to disconnect part of the mystique of the world.
Uranus is different from any other planet in our solar system. Turn sideways, which means that each pole is directly faced by the sun during a continuous “42 -year -old” summer. Uranus also revolves in the opposite direction of all planets, except Venus. NASA’s Uranus Flyby Voyby Data in 1986 also suggested that the planet is unusually cold inside, challenging scientists to reconsider the fundamental theories of how the planets formed and evolved throughout our solar system.
“From the Voyager 2 steering wheel, everyone has said that Uranus has no internal heat,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But it has been really difficult to explain why it is, especially compared to the other giant planets.”
These Uranus projections come from only one measurement close to the heat issued by the planet made by Voyager 2: “Everything depends on that data point,” Simon said. “That is part of the problem.”
Now, using an advanced computer modeling technique and reviewing decades of data, Simon and a team of scientists have discovered that Uranus in fact generates some heat, as reported in the Monthly Astronomical Society notices diary.
The internal heat of a planet can be calculated by comparing the amount of energy it receives from the Sun to the amount of energy that releases the space in reflected light and heat emitted. The other giant planets of the Solar System, Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune, emit more heat than they receive, which means that extra heat comes from inside, much of the high energy processes formed by the planets 4.5 billion years ago. The amount of heat that exudes a planet could be an indication of its age: the less heat it is released in relation to the heat absorbed from the sun, the higher the planet.
Uranus stood out from the other planets because he seemed to emit both heat and received, which implies that he had nothing his own. This baffled scientists. Some raised the hypothesis that perhaps the planet is much older than all the others and has cooled completely. Others proposed that a giant collision, the same that could have hit the planet on its side, eliminated all the heat of Uranus. But none of these hypotheses satisfied scientists, motivating them to solve the cold case of Uranus.
“We think: ‘Could it be really that there is no internal heat in Uranus?'” Said Patrick Irwin, lead author of the newspaper and professor of planetary physics at Oxford University in England. “We did many calculations to see how much sun is reflected by Uranus and we realized that it is actually more reflective than people had estimated.”
The researchers set out to determine Uranus’s total energy budget: how much energy it receives from the sun compared to how much it reflects as sunlight and how much it emits as heat. To do this, they needed to estimate the total amount of light reflected from the planet in all angles. “You need to see the scattered light on the sides, not just return directly to you,” Simon said.
To obtain the most accurate estimate of the Uranus energy budget until the same time, Oxford researchers developed a computer model that gathered everything known about the Uranus atmosphere of decades of telescopes from soil and space -based telescopes, including the NASA Hubble Space Telescope and the installation of NASA infrared telescope in Hawaii. The model included information on the dangers of the planet, clouds and seasonal changes, all of which affect the way sunlight is reflected and how it escapes heat.
The researchers found that Uranus releases approximately 15% more energy than he receives from the sun, a figure that is similar to another recent estimate of a separate study financed in part by NASA that was published on July 14 in geophysical research letters. These studies suggest that Uranus has its own heat, although even much less than its neighbor Neptune, which emits more than double the energy it receives.
“Now we have to understand what that remnant amount of heat in Uranus means, as well as get better measures,” Simon said.
Unlinking Uranus’s past is useful not only to map the timeline of when the planets of the Solar System were formed and migrated to their current orbits, but also helps scientists to better understand many of the planets discovered outside the solar system, called exoplanets, a majority of which are the same size as Uranus.
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