House is loaded with unusual issues—black holes, pulsars, gigantic clouds of alcohol, and extra bizarre planets than you could possibly depend. Even our personal photo voltaic system has some oddballs—like Neptune.
Neptune’s Floor Gravity is Just like Earth’s
Jupiter is the heavyweight champion of the planets, however Neptune isn’t any slouch both. According to NASA, Neptune is about 17 occasions extra huge than Earth, so that you’d anticipate the gravity to be crushing. Nonetheless, at Neptune’s floor, the gravity is simply about 1.1 occasions the gravity we expertise on Earth. In different phrases, if one thing weighed 100 kilos on Earth, you’ll discover it weighs 110 kilos on Neptune.
After all, Neptune is made from gasoline, and doesn’t have a definite floor like Earth and the opposite rocky interior planets do, so how will you even speak about a “floor” in any respect? To make the comparability, scientists calculated the purpose the place the atmospheric strain on Neptune is the same as the usual atmospheric strain on Earth, about 14 kilos per sq. inch.
Neptune’s Magnetic Discipline is Tilted
On Earth, the magnetic subject and the axis of rotation fairly almost line up, although the magnetic pole does wander by just a few hundred miles. That’s the reason you should utilize a compass (which is guided by the magnetic subject) to seek out the geographic north pole.
Nonetheless, on Neptune, the scenario may be very totally different. Neptune’s magnetic subject is angled about 47 levels away from the rotational axis of the planet.
That produces some attention-grabbing results, most visibly the way it impacts the aurora. Auroras happen when energetic charged particles from the Solar work together with gasoline within the environment. As a result of Neptune’s magnetic subject sits at a 47-degree angle, Neptune doesn’t get auroras at its North and South poles, it really experiences them nearer to the center of the planet.
The study, published in Nature, additionally discovered that Neptune’s higher environment has cooled from about 890 F to 350 F since Voyager 2’s go to 30 years in the past.
It Fashioned Nearer to the Solar
Neptune is essentially the most distant planet within the photo voltaic system, orbiting some 2.7 billion miles from the Solar. The huge distance signifies that Neptune takes 165 Earth years to go across the solar simply as soon as.
Nonetheless, not everybody thinks it started its life thus far out. The Good mannequin, named after Good, France, means that Neptune really shaped a lot nearer to the Solar than it’s right now—in all probability someplace simply previous Saturn, although it might have been someplace between Jupiter and Saturn.
It’s tough to show, however the movement of distant objects within the photo voltaic system match the reason properly, and that mannequin additionally explains why the interior planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) appear to have been pummeled by asteroids and comets some 4 billion years in the past.
Neptune Has Rings
There isn’t any query that Saturn has essentially the most iconic rings within the photo voltaic system, however it isn’t the one planet that has them. In actual fact, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings too. They’re simply not as spectacular as Saturn’s.
As planetary rings go, Neptune’s are particularly dim—we couldn’t even affirm they existed till Voyager 2 acquired an in depth take a look at the planet in 1989. Since then, Neptune’s rings have been imaged by JWST in close to infrared, offering necessary insights into their composition and construction.
Neptune’s rings aren’t as dense as Saturn’s, and so they are usually composed of mud.
It Most likely Isn’t Darkish Blue
When Voyager 2 cruised previous Neptune in 1989, humanity was handled to a spectacular view of the darkish blue planet—besides, it in all probability isn’t darkish blue, based on a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2024.
Scientific images aren’t just like the photographs you’re taking along with your cellphone or a digital camera. They often require intensive processing first, particularly if the picture was taken with devices that report in infrared or ultraviolet, for instance.
When Voyager 2 handed Neptune, the staff that processed the photographs did so in a method that allowed everybody a greater view of the necessary particulars in Neptune’s environment, and consequently, made it seem darker blue than it truly is. It’s a bit like punching up the distinction in a photograph to make faint textual content extra legible.
So simply what does Neptune appear to be? Nicely, a bit darker Uranus, however a far cry from the deep sapphire we’ve all come to like.
It’s nearly a bit disappointing.
Sadly for us, Neptune is simply too distant to see any element with a pair of binoculars or a yard telescope. At finest, you may be handled to a really dim view of a tiny blue dot. Nonetheless, there are many different great things to look at if you only have a pair of binoculars.