Published38 minutes ago
Our ideas of the colours of the planets Neptune and Uranus have been wrong, research led by UK astronomers reveals.
Images from a space mission in the 1980s showed Neptune to be a rich blue and Uranus green.
But a study has discovered that the two ice giant planets are both similar shades of greenish blue.
It has emerged that the earlier images of Neptune had been enhanced to show details of the planet’s atmosphere, which altered its true colour.
“They did something that I think everyone on Instagram will have done at some time in their life, they tweaked the colours,” Prof Catherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland and a University of Edinburgh astrophysics professor, told BBC Radio 4’s Today.
“They accentuated the blue just to reveal the features that you can see in Neptune’s atmosphere, and that’s why the image looks very blue, but in reality, Neptune is actually pretty similar to Uranus.”
Astronomers have long known that most modern images of the two planets do not accurately reflect their true colours, according to Prof Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford, who led the research.
“Even though the artificially saturated colour was known at the time amongst planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it – that distinction had become lost over time.”
Dr Robert Massey, deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), explained that enhancing images was normal procedure in astronomical research.
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