Storms Shakes the Atmosphere of Uranus

Astronomers witnessed extreme stormy, huge and bright cloud system on the Uranus.  The storm permits the experts to view the hazy blue-green atmosphere of Uranus.

Uranus is an ice giant which is four times larger than the diameter of the Earth.  The planet is located 19 times farther from the Sun as compared to the Earth.

Imke de Pater, head of the study informed that the weather on Uranus is extremely active.  Few months ago, Pater along with some other researchers noticed eight big storms on the Northern hemisphere of Uranus.

One was the brightest storm among all the other eight storms. In that storm Uranus was at 2.2 microns wavelength which signifies that clouds are at the pressure of 300 to 500 mbar.  This pressure is almost half of the pressure of Earth’s surface.

Larry Sromovsky, planetary scientists at the University of Wisconsin informed that the morphology and colors of the cloud indicates that the storm is joined to a vortex in the atmospheres. However, it is pretty similar to the two other complexes which were observed at the time of equinox.

Heide Hammel, the co-author of the study stated that this kind of movements was last witnessed in 2007.  This activity occurred when equinox in Uranus took place and the Sun brightly shined on the quarter.  Afterwards, the scientists believed that this sort of activity would not occur in future. Therefore, these storms are certainly a big surprise for the astronomers.

The researchers presented the details of these findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences.