As Sunspots Come and Go, So Does the Cloudy Weather on the Blue Giant Planet Weather forecast for Neptune: After sunny weather for the past few Earth years, we'll see increasingly more clouds over the next few years. In 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft provided the first close-up images of line
This sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images chronicles the waxing and waning of the amount of cloud cover on Neptune. This long set of observations shows that the number of clouds grows increasingly following a peak in the solar cycle – where the Sun’s level of activity rhythmically rises and falls over an 11-year period. The chemical changes are caused by photochemistry, which happens high in Neptune’s upper atmosphere and takes time to form clouds.
Yet the Sun’s influence on Neptune became increasingly obvious when astronomers looked at 30 years of Neptune observations with the Hubble and Keck telescopes. Neptune’s abundance of clouds waxes and wanes over an 11-years cycle. The Sun also has an 11-year cycle where it becomes stormy as its magnetic fields become entangled, increasing sunspot number and rate of violent outbursts.
Currently, Neptune’s cloud coverage is notably sparse, with the exception of some clouds hovering over the giant planet’s south pole. A University of California Berkeley-led team of astronomers discovered that the abundance of clouds normally seen at the icy giant’s mid-latitudes started to fade in 2019.
To monitor the evolution of Neptune’s appearance, Chavez and her team analyzed Keck Observatory images taken from 2002 to 2022, the Hubble Space Telescope archival observations beginning in 1994, and data from the Lick Observatory in California from 2018 to 2019. “These remarkable data give us the strongest evidence yet that Neptune’s cloud cover correlates with the Sun’s cycle,” said de Pater. “Our findings support the theory that the Sun’s UV rays, when strong enough, may be triggering a photochemical reaction that produces Neptune’s clouds.”
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