PARIS (AFP) - The cold atmosphere of Neptune, the farthest planet from the sun, has a surprising activity, announced this week an international team of astrophysicists in a study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
This discovery was made possible by the Very Large Telescope European Southern Observatory at La Silla (Chile), equipped with an infrared observation instrument.
Astronomers knew that the atmosphere of Neptune, situated at 4,500 million km from the Sun (Earth is about 150 million km), contains high amounts of methane in its south pole, eight times higher than its polar north, but had not able to find out why.
With the images produced by the instrument VISIR, astronomers involved in the project have solved the enigma. According to them, the phenomenon comes from the thermal differences of the atmosphere of Neptune (whose average temperature is below 220 degrees Celsius), being the planet's south pole warmer point.
Thus, methane, which is frozen in the troposphere (lower layer of the atmosphere) at other latitudes, it becomes gas and seeps into the stratosphere (upper layer of the atmosphere).
This is because in Neptune, where a year lasts 165 Earth years, the South Pole is consistently solar energy for 40 years, the investigators of the study, said in a statement from the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) of France. The observations allowed
locate a point "warm" whose temperature is three degrees higher than the adjacent areas.
movements this results indicate that the atmosphere of Neptune is perhaps more active than that of Jupiter and Saturn, but also gaseous planets nearest the sun, researchers stress.
"We can expect that within 80 years, when the north pole of Neptune is in summer, there is a reversal of the situation and there is a surplus the transfer of methane from South Pole to North Pole, "they added.
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