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Neptune's atmosphere is faintly blue in the optical spectrum, only slightly more saturated than the blue of Uranus's atmosphere. Early renderings of the two planets greatly exaggerated Neptune's colour contrast "to better reveal the clouds, bands and winds", making it seem deep blue compared to Uranus's off-white.
The Great Dark Spot was captured by NASA's Voyager 2 space probe in Neptune's southern hemisphere. The dark, elliptically shaped spot (with initial dimensions of 13,000 × 6,600 km, or 8,100 × 4,100 mi), was about the same size as Earth, and was similar in general appearance to Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
It is the only moon of Neptune massive enough to be rounded under its own gravity and hosts a thin, hazy atmosphere. Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde orbit—revolving in the opposite direction to the parent planet's rotation—the only large moon in the Solar System to do so.
Scientists saw similarities between the Uranus Dark Spot (UDS) and the Great Dark Spots (GDS) on Neptune, although UDS was much smaller. GDS were thought to be anticyclonic vortices in Neptune's atmosphere and UDS is assumed to be similar in nature. [33] In 1998, HST captured infrared images of multiple storms raging on Uranus due to seasonal ...
The outermost portion of their hydrogen atmosphere contains many layers of visible clouds that are mostly composed of water (despite earlier consensus that there was no water anywhere in the Solar System besides Earth) and ammonia. The layer of metallic hydrogen located in the mid-interior makes up the bulk of every gas giant and is referred to ...
Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and is slightly more massive than its near-twin Uranus, which is 15 times the mass of Earth and slightly larger than Neptune. [a] Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at an average distance of 30.1 astronomical units (4.50 × 10 9 km).
Uranus emits the least heat, one-tenth as much as Neptune. It is suspected that this may be related to its extreme 98˚ axial tilt. This causes its seasonal patterns to be very different from those of any other planet in the Solar System. [2] There are still no complete models explaining the atmospheric features observed in the ice giants. [2]
The climate of Triton encompasses the atmospheric dynamics, weather, and long-term atmospheric trends of Neptune's moon Triton. The atmosphere of Triton is rather thin, with a surface pressure of only 1.4 Pa (1.38 × 10 −5 atm) at the time of Voyager 2 ' s flyby, [ 1 ] : 873 but heavily variable.