In the outermost planes of our solar system, Neptune continues to stand as a frigid and far-flung enigma, adding to its mystery every other year, as this time it puzzled astronomers with a surprising drop in its atmospheric temperatures in the last two decades.
Focusing upon Neptune's stratosphere – the atmosphere's relatively stable region above the turbulent weather layer – the researchers had expected to find rising temperatures in the part of the planet visible from Earth with the onset of its southern hemisphere summer, a season lasting four decades. Instead, they found temperatures declining significantly.
The study was based on more than 95 thermal-infrared images – every one ever taken – spanning 2003 to 2020 using ground-based telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, mostly the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. It is the most comprehensive assessment to date of Neptune's atmospheric temperatures.
"The atmosphere appears more complicated than we had naively assumed, which, unsurprisingly, seems to be a general lesson that nature teaches scientists again and again," said Michael Roman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leicester in England and lead author of the study published on Monday in the Planetary Science Journal.
Neptune's stratosphere temperature fell as much as 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) to minus 117 degrees Celsius (minus 179 degrees Fahrenheit) over the 17 years studied. In contrast, temperatures in Neptune's troposphere – the even-colder weather layer – showed no significant variability while reaching as low as minus 223 degrees Celsius (minus 370 degrees Fahrenheit).
Neptune is among the least explored of the solar system's eight planets, with its great distance making it difficult to study from Earth. NASA's Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have made a close-up visit, flying past Neptune in 1989.
"I think Neptune is very intriguing to many of us because we still know so little about it," Roman said.
Its temperature changes were unevenly distributed, with regional variations. The southern tropics cooled, then warmed, then cooled again. Mid-latitudes temperatures initially remained constant before falling gradually. South pole temperatures initially dropped only slightly before warming dramatically between 2018 and 2020.
"I suspect the overall temperature drop may most likely be due to changes in the atmospheric chemistry, which responds to changing seasonal sunlight and, in turn, alters how effectively the atmosphere cools," Roman said.
Neptune's average diameter is about 49,250 kilometers (30,600 miles), making it four times wider than Earth. It orbits more than 30 times as far away from the sun as Earth at an average distance of about 4.5 billion kilometers (2.8 billion miles), needing about 165 Earth years to complete a single orbit around the sun – a Neptunian year.
The dwarf planet Pluto most of the time orbits even further away but its oval-shaped orbit sometimes brings it closer to the sun than Neptune.
Neptune and neighboring Uranus are classified as ice giants, as opposed to the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Neptune, which like those other planets lacks a solid surface, possesses an extremely dynamic atmosphere mainly of hydrogen and helium, with a small amount of methane, atop a mantle mostly of slushy ammonia and water and a solid core. Neptune boasts the strongest winds of any planet.
Neptune may offer lessons about planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, said study co-author Glenn Orton, a planetary scientist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"The close relationship that Neptune may share with a large segment of the population of exoplanets," Orton said, "means that it may be 'an exoplanet in our backyard' – probably on the colder end of that spectrum, but still a model for the things we might expect to see in the meteorology of various exoplanets."