Posted on 06/20/2019 8:55:48 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The rings of Uranus are invisible to all but the largest telescopes—they weren't even discovered until 1977—but they're surprisingly bright in new heat images of the planet taken by two large telescopes in the high deserts of Chile.
The thermal glow gives astronomers another window onto the rings, which have been seen only because they reflect a little light in the visible, or optical, range and in the near-infrared. The new images taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) allowed the team for the first time to measure the temperature of the rings: a cool 77 Kelvin, or 77 degrees above absolute zero—the boiling temperature of liquid nitrogen and equivalent to 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
The observations also confirm that Uranus's brightest and densest ring, called the epsilon ring, differs from the other known ring systems within our solar system, in particular the spectacularly beautiful rings of Saturn.
By comparison, Jupiter's rings contain mostly small, micron-sized particles (a micron is a thousandth of a millimeter). Neptune's rings are also mostly dust, and even Uranus has broad sheets of dust between its narrow main rings.
The lack of dust-sized particles in Uranus's main rings was first noted when Voyager 2 flew by the planet in 1986 and photographed them. The spacecraft was unable to measure the temperature of the rings, however.
To date, astronomers have counted a total of 13 rings around the planet, with some bands of dust between the rings. The rings differ in other ways from those of Saturn.
observations were designed to explore the temperature structure of Uranus' atmosphere, with VLT probing shorter wavelengths than ALMA.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
In before beavis and butthead...
In before the jokes.
Here come the jokes.
who the heck thinks these headlines up? Yeesh- that’s a bad one-
Here we go again...
Okay you just know these headline writers are busting a gut creating headlines about Uranus.
Popcorn at the ready, this is gonna be fun.
As long as you don’t make me smell Uranus.
I don’t get it.
I’m sorry, Fry but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Oh. What’s it called now?
Urectum.
Now, that’s got Mayor Pete’s attention!
Warm Uranus rings, paging Buttigieg.
Posted here for only one reason.
I thought this was an article about Obama.
In before thread is pulled?
Someone really needs to do a better job of wiping Uranus.
It was the tacos.
Sponsored by Charmin.
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