A team of international astronomers used several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), to track Neptune’s atmospheric temperatures over a 17-year period and they discovered an unexpected drop in the planet’s global temperatures followed by a dramatic warming at its south pole. Around 100 thermal-infrared images of Neptune, captured over a 17-year period, were looked at before putting together overall trends in the planet’s temperature in greater detail.
What they found was that despite Neptune’s southern summer, most of the planet had gradually cooled over the last 20-years, or more specifically, dropped by 8°C between 2003 and 2018. However, the astronomers didn’t expect to find a dramatic warming of Neptune’s south pole during the last two years of their observations, when temperatures rapidly rose 11°C between 2018 and 2020, a phenomenon that has never been previously observed on the planet.
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Our data cover less than half of a Neptune season, so no one was expecting to see large and rapid changes,” said Glenn Orton, co-author and senior research scientist at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the US.
