Impressive: They capture the dreaded giant cyclone of Uranus and confirm theories about its atmosphere

A die the planets more mysterious in us solar system East Uranus. Its thick layers of atmosphere prevent us from observing —with the naked eye— what pass through him, it’s not like Jupiter that its great spots show storms, or how Neptune where one clearly perceives their infernal gusts which exceed two thousand kilometers per hour. For this reason, this latest discovery is extremely important, as it confirms all the theories and hypotheses of astronomers. They predicted that “the grandfather of Zeus” housed inside powerful And abyssal cyclones It’s just that with the technology we used, we couldn’t get that close. Confirm.

The only planet with vertical rings and a strange rotation is Uranus

This celestial body has two systems of vertical rings which were detected in the photographs of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a very strange rotation around our star and the most terrifying winters in the solar system, lasting more than a quarter of century. However, now scientists the american space agency they were able to satisfy some of their curiosity by this planet and see for the first time a polar cyclone In Uranus. This was possible due to the fact that specialists used microwave observations, who threw several images at them of the star with different “colors” which represented the wavelengths of the “stellar phenomenon”.

What does the dreaded Uranus cyclone look like?

In the images captured by The NASA, It looks like the planet is home to a light-colored dot on the right and at the center of the planet. Then to distinguish its size, length strips were used to measure K, Ka and Q waves from the left of the image. They thus highlighted characteristics of “space phenomenon”, with a different color card for each. To achieve this result, it was not necessary to use the famous space telescopes, they were simply redirected the earthly ones to get the unprecedented views of Uranus, In addition, specialists were favored by the position of the planet giant in his long orbit around of Sun.

With this we have strong evidence to confirm the theories that were current on the atmosphere of The gas giant the whipping polar cyclones to the planet. Indeed, when examining the radio waves emitted For ice giant, detected the phenomenon in the star’s north pole The results confirmed a broad truth on all celestial bodies with atmospheres substantial In our solar system. This means that whether the planets are composed mostly of rock or gas, their atmospheres always show signs of a swirling vortex In the poles.

Scientists already knew the secret of Uranus

For a long time, the scientists they already knew that at the south pole of the star was a dangerous whirlwind. Yet now THE pictures from the top Clouds of methane of Traveler 2 of the JAR, they showed us the winds In the polar center spinning faster than in the rest of the pole. Thanks to Voyager infrared measurements the specialists specified that there was no temperature changes, but these new discoveries – published in Geophysical Research Letters – break with the paradigm that was held of “grandfather of Zeus”.

New Mexico participated in this discovery

enormous radio antennas of Very Large Array in New Mexico, USA; looked under the clouds of ice giant and determined that the air that circulates in the North Pole it seems warmer and drier which, in climatological terms, translates to characteristic of a powerful cyclone. They were collected in the 2015, 2021 and 2022, so the observations went deep more than ever In the atmosphere of Uranus.

“These observations tell us a lot more about the history of Uranus. It’s a much more dynamic world than you think,” said lead author Alex Akins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It’s not just a ball of gas blue. There’s a lot going on under the hood.”

Thanks to the new position of the planet in orbit, Uranus looks like the “star of the show” among the planets of our solar system. We must remember that a long-haul to be able to study this planet. In fact, your current location takes you 84 years old to have it again, since that’s what it takes The star to give it a full turn under the sun. Thus, in recent decades the poles they weren’t pointing Earth. In fact, to be more precise, since about 2015, scientists had not had a better view let them watch more deeply In the polar atmosphere.