The most distant planet in the solar system, depicted as dark blue for more than 30 years, is actually a pale blue hue very similar to that of its neighbor Uranus, a study from the University of Oxford shows.
The planet Neptune, which made the first – and so far only – flyby of the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, appeared as a dark blue jewel in the photos published by NASA.
However, these photos do not reflect reality, believes Professor Patrick Irwin, who and his team revised the colors of the photos taken by Voyager 2 so that they correspond to reality.
During its flyby of the solar system's most distant planet, the probe took photos in different colors. These were then recombined, creating composite photos that, in the case of Neptune, turned out to be too blue. The contrast has also been increased to highlight the clouds on the planet's surface.
“Although artificially saturated colors are known to planetary scientists and these images were published with captions that explain everything, this distinction has been forgotten over time,” Professor Irwin explained in a press release.
His team therefore examined Uranus and Neptune using instruments from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's VLT (Very Large Telescope) to determine the actual colors of these planets. She was then able to rework the Voyager 2 photos again.
Ultimately, it turns out that Uranus and Neptune have a very similar color, a slightly bluish and greenish hue, slightly bluer for the eighth planet.