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In contrast to the strongly seasonal atmosphere of Uranus, which can be featureless for long periods of time, Neptune's atmosphere has active and consistently visible weather patterns. At the time of the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989, the planet's southern hemisphere had a Great Dark Spot comparable to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.
Neptune and Uranus are now referred to as ice giants. Lacking well-defined solid surfaces, they are primarily composed of gases and liquids. Their constituent compounds were solids when they were primarily incorporated into the planets during their formation, either directly in the form of ice or trapped in water ice.
[a] Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at an average distance of 30.1 astronomical units (4.50 × 10 9 km). It is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol ♆, a stylised version of the god Neptune's trident.
Neptune, for example, has an atmosphere made of hydrogen and helium (with just a tinge of methane), and it doesn’t really have a surface—or, at least, not what we think of as a surface.
Voyager 2 studied Neptune's atmosphere, Neptune's rings, its magnetosphere, and Neptune's moons. [6] The Neptunian system had been studied scientifically for many years with telescopes and indirect methods, but the close inspection by the Voyager 2 probe settled many issues [ example needed ] and revealed a plethora of information that could ...
Neptune has long been known to have white clouds circling it, but images of the furthest planet in the solar system have shown this changing over time - the most recent image, taken by the Hubble ...
Telescope data may have helped researchers figure out why. Four years ago, astronomers noticed the abundant clouds on Neptune had largely disappeared. Telescope data may have helped researchers ...
Uranus has more hydrogen and helium than Neptune despite being less massive overall. Neptune is therefore denser and has much more internal heat and a more active atmosphere. The Nice model, in fact, suggests that Neptune formed closer to the Sun than Uranus did, and should therefore have more heavy elements.