New images processed by Professor Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and his colleagues reveal the true colors of Neptune and Uranus. Despite what you’ve seen captured by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, both planets are in fact a similar shade of greenish blue.
This new study utilized data from Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. Each pixel is a continuous spectrum of colors in both of these instruments, which means that STIS as well as MUSE observations can be unambiguously processed to determine the true color of Neptune and Uranus.
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Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to ‘true’ color, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue. Even though the artificially-saturated color was known at the time amongst planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it – that distinction had become lost over time. Applying our model to the original data, we have been able to reconstitute the most accurate representation yet of the color of both Neptune and Uranus,” said Professor Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics.
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