the templetemperature on Neptune is doing something weird, and we’re not responsible for a change. The planet is getting even cooler when it should bedoing the opposite and it is not a recent trend. It has been undergoing this process for the last 17 years, but we still do not know the reason.
A new study published in The Planetary Science Journal by ESO scientists confirms that the average temperature of the planet has dropped by 8 degrees Celsius between 2003 and 2018. Neptune is a planet of extremes and 8 degrees may not seem like muchbut we are talking about a very radical change in planetary terms. Here on Earth, to cite a reference, a difference of one degree already implies severe changes in the climate of the entire planet.
The southern hemisphere of Neptuno I enter in his phasesummer” in 2005. Every season on the planet it lasts about 40 years, something normal if we take into account that a Neptunian year is equivalent to 165 Earth yearsbut instead of gradually heating up, it cooled down only to suddenly rise 11 degrees Celsius in a period of just two years (between 2018 and 2020) Lthe two fluctuations son totally unexpected.
Measuring Neptune’s temperature is no easy task. For starters, the gas planet is extremely cold. Its average temperature is -220 degrees Celsius. To make things worse,he last probe to pass through was Voyager 2 in 1989, so lAstronomers have been monitoring changes in the planet’s temperature for years from Earth and thanks to VISIR, an infrared spectrometer that is part of the Very Large Telescope’s instruments, in it THEsouthern european observatory of the Atacama desert in Chile.
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Los científicos no están seguros de a qué se debe este cambio climático. Neptuno está tan lejos del Sol que el calor que recibe de la estrella es el mismo que el que irradian sus propios procesos geotérmicos. Quizá este cambio se deba a una alteración en esos procesos. Otras de las hipótesis apuntan a alguna fluctuación no registrada en la energía que recibe del Sol, o a algún cambio en la composición química de su estratosfera. Los astrónomos esperan poder obtener más datos cuando entre en funcionamiento el Telescopio Extremadamente grande (ELT), cuya terminación está prevista para 2024. [Observatorio Europeo del Sur via IFL Science]