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Here’s What Neptune Actually Looks Like Because Our Photos Have Been ‘Wrong’ All Along
Amaze Lab
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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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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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