The bluest planet in the solar system is the one you're currently on, according to new research. Researchers say that when images of Neptune were made from data sent back by NASA's Voyager 2 in the 1980s, the planet was depicted as deep blue to enhance contrast and highlight some of its features, the Guardian reports. The planet is in fact a pale blue-green color, very similar to its neighbor and fellow ice giant Uranus, according to Oxford University researchers. At the time, captions made it clear that the images had been enhanced, but the "captions inevitably got separated from the images over time and have given rise to the longstanding and persistent misunderstanding of the relative colors of these two planets," the researchers say.
Lead researcher Patrick Irwin, a professor of planetary sciences, and his team compared images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Very Large Telescope, as well as the Voyager images, Space.com reports. They say Uranus and Neptune are an almost identical duck-egg color, with Uranus slightly paler due to a thicker layer of haze. "Uranus is still bland and rather boring looking, but Neptune looks fairly washed-out as well when you do the full true color reconstruction," Irwin says.
Astronomer Heidi Hammel, who worked on the Voyager imaging team in 1989, says she hopes the study "can help undo the decades of misinformation about Neptune's color," the New York Times reports. She adds, "Strike the word 'azure' from your vocabulary when discussing Neptune!" Irwin says the research also determined that methane levels at Uranus' poles cause shifts in its color during its 21-year-long seasons, though many questions remain. "There's a whole lot about these planets that we just don't understand," Irwin says, per the Guardian. "We need to actually go into orbit and drop a probe down so that we can see exactly what's there, rather than trying to piece it together from remote-sensed observations." (More Neptune stories.)
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