Recent changes in Neptune’s summer weather patterns have puzzled scientists—it’s cooling down, when it normally would be warming.
Neptune is around 30 times farther away from the Sun than Earth is—about 2.8 billion miles—and since the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a “dwarf planet,” Neptune is the most distant planet in our Solar System. Just like every other planet that has a tilt in its axis relative to the plane of its orbit, it experiences seasons, and since it takes about 165 years to orbit the Sun, each of the seasons lasts about 40 years; Neptune’s summer began around 2005.
In a study published in April 11, 2022 in the Planetary Science Journal, researchers noted that during its summer, Neptune’s southern hemisphere has been dramatically cooling down. (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac5aa4/pdf)
LiveScience.com reported that in this study, “researchers compiled infrared images of Neptune taken by a variety of ground and space-based telescopes between 2003 and 2020. The team initially expected that temperatures in Neptune’s southern hemisphere would increase as it entered summer. However, the images revealed that atmospheric temperatures in the southern hemisphere had dropped by 14.4° Fahrenheit (8° Celsius) between 2003 and 2018.
“Moreover, in the last two years of the study, temperatures around Neptune’s south pole rose by 19.8° F (11° C) between 2018 and 2020. The researchers were puzzled by rapid and intense temperature change and cannot explain why this hotspot is bucking the overall trend in the southern hemisphere…
