The strange glowing rings around a distant ice giant
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The strange glowing rings around a distant ice giant

Strange things happened long ago in the cold and distant realm of our Solar System’s two giant ice planets, Uranus and Neptune, the duo of beautiful blue-banded denizens of the outer region of the planetary system surrounding our Sun. partner, the greenish-blue Uranus stands out from the crowd of eight known major planets in our Solar System. This is because Uranus is believed to have been violently knocked over when a doomed primordial world that was twice the size of Earth plunged into it billions of years ago. Uranus is also surrounded by a system of mysterious, thin, dark rings that are invisible to all but the largest telescopes. For this reason, the moons of Uranus were not discovered until 1977. Nevertheless, In June 2019, a team of astronomers announced that Uranus’s rings are startlingly bright in heat images of the ice giant taken by a pair of large telescopes in the high deserts of Chile.

This thermal glow provides astronomers with a new understanding of the nature of these exotic rings, which have been successfully observed simply because they reflect a small amount of light in the visible or optical range and in the near infrared. The new images were obtained from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and allowed the team of astronomers to measure the temperature of the rings for the first time. Uranus’ rings are frigid structures: a chilly 77 Kelvin, or 77 degrees above absolute zero: the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen and equivalent to 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

The new observations also verify that Uranus’s brightest and densest ring, called the epsilon ring, it is different from the other known ring systems that revolve around other planets in our Solar System. This difference is especially pronounced in Saturn’s beautiful and spectacular ring system.

“Saturn’s rings here are mainly wide, bright and have a variety of particle sizes, from micron-sized dust in the interior d-ring to tens of meters in size in the main rings. The small end is missing in the main rings of Uranus, the brightest ring epsilon is made up of rocks the size of a golf ball and larger,” said Dr. Imke de Pater in a June 20, 2019 report Press release from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB). Dr. de Pater is a professor of astronomy at UCB.

In dramatic contrast, Jupiter’s rings are composed mostly of tiny, micron-sized particles. Neptune’s rings are also mostly made of dust, and even Uranus has extensive dust layers between its thin main rings. One micron is a thousandth of a millimeter.

wandering primordial worlds

In the cold and dimly lit outer Solar System, in the distant realm of the giant planets, Uranus casts an eerie emerald green glow on its icy family of moons. Uranus’s moon Miranda is especially interesting. It is a small lunar world that displays a chaotic icy surface unlike any other known world in our Solar System. Many astronomers believe that the original Miranda fell apart billions of years ago, and after the wreck, the frozen, mismatched remnants of the original moon collided and merged. The jumbled chunks of ice, brought back together by the force of gravity, created a strange new moon with a churning, chaotic terrain.

Uranus was discovered on March 13, 1781 by the German-born English astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822), and his discovery was a complete accident. While surveying the stars in the night sky, using a telescope he had built himself, Herschel noticed that one of these “stars” seemed to be traveling to the beat of a different drum. After observing this strange “star” many more times, he realized that it was not a star at all and that it was in orbit around our Sun. The strange “star” was the planet we now call Uranus.

At last count, Uranus is orbited by 27 moons that are composed of rock, ice, or both. All of Uranus’ moons are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare. The character Miranda is the heroine of HAS Summer night Dream.

Uranus is the seventh major planet from our star, and it is almost certain that Uranus, and its brother, the ice giant Neptune, did not form where they are now, 19 and 30 astronomical units (AU) of the sun. One FOR it is equivalent to the average separation between the Sun and the Earth, which is about 93,000,000 miles. The accretion process, which was responsible for the formation of the planets that inhabit our Solar System, was much slower farther from the Sun, where Uranus and Neptune are currently located. this primordial protoplanetary accretion diskwhich was composed of gas, dust, and ice, was too thin in this outer domain to allow planets of this large size to form as quickly as they would in the hotter, denser region of the disk that rotates closer to our star.

Astronomers have struggled to create a model that could explain how the ice giant duo reached their current large sizes if they were born where they are today. Tea protoplanetary accretion disk it would have dissipated long before giant worlds had a chance to be born in this region of our Solar System. For this reason, many astronomers think that the cores of Uranus and Neptune formed closer to the ancient Sun and then traveled to their current remote locations long ago.

While it may seem peaceful now, we really do live in a “cosmic shooting gallery.” These ever-growing primordial objects grew from pebble-sized, mountain-sized, moon-sized, planet-sized in the crowded and violent disk environment. Sometimes ancient planet-sized bodies collided with other planet-sized worlds, thus wreaking havoc. Gravitational influences, resulting from the wanderings of these migratory worlds, shot some planets howling into other regions of our Solar System, or even out of our Solar System altogether.

Uranus orbits our Star on its side. Uranus’ axis of rotation is roughly parallel to the plane of our Solar System, sporting an axial tilt of 97.77 (defined by prograde rotation). For this reason, Uranus experiences seasonal changes that are unlike all other planets in our Sun’s family. Near the solstice, one pole faces our Star continuously, while the face of the other pole is continually turned away. Only a very narrow region around Uranus’ equator experiences a rapid cycle of day and night:but with the Sun hanging low over the horizon. Instead, on the other side of Uranus’ orbit, the orientation of the poles toward our Sun is the opposite. Each pole receives about 42 years of incessant sunlight, followed by about 42 years of endless darkness. Approaching the time of the equinoxes, our Star faces the equator of Uranus giving a period of day and night cycles similar to those experienced on most other planets that inhabit our Solar System.

Uranus experienced its most recent equinox on December 7, 2007. One consequence of this axis orientation is that, on average over the span of a Uranian year, Uranus’ polar regions receive a greater input of energy from our Sun than their polar regions. equatorial regions. Despite this, Uranus is hotter at its equator than at its poles, and the cause of this is unknown. The reason given for Uranus’s strange axial tilt is similarly unknown. However, the usual explanation given is that, about 4.5 billion years ago, an Earth-sized protoplanet collided with Uranus, thus skewing its orientation.

The strange rings of a distant ice giant

Several theories have been proposed to explain the origin of Uranus’s rings: they could be ancient asteroids trapped by the giant green planet’s gravity, the shattered remains of shattered moons that shattered into each other, the relic fragments of shattered moons when they wandered too. near its parent planet, or lingering remnants of our Solar System’s ancient formation.

The new data was published in the July 2019 issue of the astronomical diary. De Pater and Molter directed the SOUL observations, while Dr Michael Roman and Dr Leigh Fletcher from the University of Leicester in the UK led the VLT observations.

“Uranus’ rings have a different composition than Saturn’s main ring in the sense that in the optical and infrared the albedo is much lower, they are really dark, like carbon. They are extremely narrow compared to the rings of Saturn. epsilon ringvaries from 20 to 100 kilometers wide, while Saturn is 100 to tens of thousands of kilometers wide,” Molter explained on June 20, 2019. UCB press release.

The absence of dust-sized particles in Uranus’s main rings was first detected in 1986, when traveler 2 he flew by the green ice giant planet and obtained revealing images of them. Unfortunately, the spacecraft was unable to measure the temperature of the rings. Currently, astronomers have counted a total of 13 rings around the planet, with some dust lanes swirling between the rings. Uranus’s rings differ in other ways from those of the gas giant Saturn.

“It’s great that we can even do this with the instruments that we have. I was just trying to get a picture of the planet as best I could and I saw the rings. It was amazing,” Molter added.

Both of them VLT Y SOUL The observations were designed to study the temperature structure of Uranus’ atmosphere, with VLT probing wavelengths shorter than SOUL.

The new research presents an intriguing opportunity for the next James Webb Space Telescopewhich will have the ability to provide much improved spectroscopic constraints on Uranus’ rings over the next decade.

Dr. Fletcher commented on June 20, 2019 UCB press release that “We were amazed to see that the rings jumped clearly when we first reduced the data.”

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