Hubble reveals 20-year time-lapse of Uranus' changing atmosphere

Otherwordly Seasons: Uranus, the seventh planet in the Solar System, is an "ice giant" that travels around the Sun while tipped on its side. NASA describes the planet as a mysterious and mostly unknown world, though new research tried to examine some of its planetary features in unprecedented detail. An international team used 20 years of data and photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to study Uranus' atmosphere and its seasonal changes. The icy world was portrayed for the first time in 1986, during a Voyager 2 flyby. We have known about Uranus' characteristic cyan color since then, but the Hubble data can now provide a closer picture of the planet's atmospheric composition and how it is affected by sunlight. A team of astronomers led by Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona), Larry Sromovsky and Pat Fry (University of Wisconsin), used the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on the Hubble telescope to chronicle seasonal changes between 2002 and 2022. Uranus' atmosphere is mos ... Read full article.