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  • 1/5/2024
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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Transcript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:04 Neptune is way, way out there, orbiting the sun
00:06 some 2.8 billion miles away.
00:09 And that's likely why a new analysis
00:10 of some old photos of the ice giant
00:12 have just revealed something a bit funny.
00:14 We've been wrong about what it looked like all along.
00:17 The new revelation stems from a simple query by astronomers.
00:20 Why do Neptune and Uranus look so different,
00:22 given the atmospheric situation on both planets
00:25 is nearly identical?
00:26 So researchers reprocessed photos
00:28 taken from Voyager 2 back in the day
00:30 and used new images via Hubble and the Very Large Telescope's
00:33 multi-unit spectroscopic explorer to confirm it.
00:36 And sure enough, Neptune appears to be a near-identical twin
00:39 to Uranus.
00:40 So what happened when they first processed the photos?
00:43 Here's what planetary scientist Patrick Irwin
00:45 had to say about that.
00:46 Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus
00:48 were published in a form closer to true color,
00:51 those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced
00:54 and therefore made artificially too blue.
00:56 The instrumentation on Voyager 2 actually
00:58 took photos of the two planets in different color bands,
01:01 meaning when processed, Neptune's contrast
01:03 was emphasized.
01:04 This deepened its hue, producing the images we've previously
01:08 been more familiar with.
01:10 (upbeat music)
01:13 [MUSIC]

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