Why is neptune bluer than uranus?

Why is Neptune blue?

In California, it was 9,pm on August 24, 1989. Some 2.7 million people sat ready to watch ‘Neptune All Night’, a TV spectacular that promised the first pictures of the planet, almost as soon as they were received by 130 scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.

Voyager 2 made its closest approach to the planet when it passed over the north pole of Neptune at 9 pm Californian time, its cameras focused. Because of the vast distances involved (Neptune was then 4400 million km/2750 million miles from Earth), it was about 1 am before the images were seen at JPL. When the pictures were screened on TV soon after, people reacted with cries of delight. Nobody had expected Neptune, in full colour, to be such a beautiful sight, a glorious and spectacular shade of blue.

Until Voyager 2’s epic journey, Neptune’s cold world was almost a total mystery. The giant planet, with a diameter nearly four times that of the Earth, was first noticed by Galileo in 1612, but he failed to recognise it as a newcomer. Observing the moons ofJupiter, he saw what he believed to be a star nearby, and after further study even commented that he thought the ‘star’ had changed position (as only a planet would). Perhaps because he feared trouble with the Church, he failed to follow up his discovery. It was not until 1846 that Neptune was identified as a new planet.

Why is neptune bluer than uranus?

We now know that Neptune, inexplicably, is racked constantly by savage storms and winds three times as strong as the worst Earth tornado. Like Uranus, with which it is linked, it has an atmosphere made up chiefly of hydrogen and helium. One difference is that the gases surrounding Neptune contain ethane, a constituent of the natural gas methane. The methane absorbs red light, giving the planet its distinctive shade of blue.