Neptune Notes PDF

Neptune Neptune is dark, cold, and very windy. It's the last of the planets in our solar system. It's more than 30 times as far from the sun as Earth is. Neptune...

Neptune Neptune is dark, cold, and very windy. It's the last of the planets in our solar system. It's more than 30 times as far from the sun as Earth is. Neptune is very similar to Uranus. It's made of a thick fog of water, ammonia, and methane over an Earth-sized solid center. The planet is named after the Roman god of the sea. From this distance, it takes sunlight 4 hours to travel from the Sun to Neptune. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The methane gives Neptune the same blue color as Uranus. It has a thick atmosphere. Neptune is our solar system's windiest world. Despite its great distance and low energy input from the Sun. Neptune's winds can be three times stronger than Jupiter's and nine times stronger than Earth's. In 1989 a large, oval-shaped storm in Neptune's southern hemisphere dubbed the "Great Dark Spot" was large enough to contain the entire Earth. That storm has since disappeared, but new ones have appeared on different parts of the planet. Neptune has at least six rings and four more ring arcs, but they're very hard to see. One day on Neptune goes by in 16 hours (one complete rotation). Neptune has such a long journey around the Sun it takes 165 Earth years to go around once. Neptune was discovered in 1846 and in 2011, Neptune completed its first 165-year orbit since its discovery. Neptune has 14 moons. Neptune's largest moon Triton was discovered in 1846, just 17 days after Neptune was discovered. Triton is the only large moon in the solar system that orbits backward. This suggests that it may once have been an independent object that Neptune captured. Triton is extremely cold, with surface temperatures around minus 235 degrees Celsius. And yet, despite this deep freeze at Triton, Voyager 2 discovered geysers spewing icy material upward more than 8 kilometers. Triton's thin atmosphere, also discovered by Voyager, has been detected from Earth several times since and is growing warmer, but scientists do not yet know why. Neptune’s Exploration Photo: NASA Uranus has only been visited by Voyager 2. After traveling 3 billion kilometers in nine years, NASA's Voyager 2 gathered information about Uranus including its rings and moons, in just six hours. The rest of what we know about Uranus comes from observations via the Hubble Space Telescope and several powerful ground-based telescopes. Voyager 2 discovered 10 new moons, two new rings, and a magnetic field stronger than that of Saturn. On Mar. 18, 2011: New Horizons passed the orbit of Uranus on its way to Pluto, becoming the first spacecraft to journey beyond Uranus' orbit since Voyager 2. However, Uranus was not near the crossing point. The spacecraft is asleep during most of its eight-year interplanetary trek from Jupiter to Pluto. Mission controllers do wake up New Horizons for 50 days each year to perform necessary checkups on its instruments. Photo: NASA References: https://science.nasa.gov/neptune/ https://science.nasa.gov/neptune/facts/ https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/all-about-neptune/en/