An international team of scientists has carried out a study onUranusthat reveals thatthe wind on the planet can reach gusts of over 900 kilometers per hour. The new work, presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, has been made thanks to new images obtained thanks to a new technique at the Keck Observatory (Hawaii), which have revealed a“strange” weather on Uranus. Specifically, the images indicate that the planet has athick atmosphere of hydrogen, helium and methane, and that there the winds blow mainly from east to west at speeds that reach 900 km / h, despite the small amounts of energy available to drive them, according to scientists.
In addition, researchers have pointed out that the atmosphere is almost the same as Neptune’s and thattheir temperatures are cold enough to freeze methane, around the-180ºC.
One of the authors of the work, Heidi Hammel, has explained that “these images reveal an amazing amount of complexity in the atmosphere of Uranus”. “The planet was known to be active, but so far most of the activity was masked by ‘noise’ in the data,” he said.
For his part, the scientist Larry Sromovsky, has explained that the great meteorological systems of Uranus behave differently from those now detected. As he has indicated, the wave-shaped cloud band near the planet’s equator may indicate atmospheric instability. “This is new and what it means is not fully understood because it has not been seen anywhere else,” confessed the researcher, who has announced that he is determined to deepen the study of the seventh planet of the solar system and warns that Uranus “it is changing”.
