![]() ![]() Roughly 4 times Earth’s diameter, they are almost identical in size (to within 3 percent), and their deep interiors have comparable rotation rates: 17 and 16 hours, respectively. Uranus and Neptune have some obvious similarities. ![]() The Hubble Space Telescope is also used to track storm and cloud activity over time, and even the Kepler spacecraft observed the ice giants as they passed through its field of view. Planetary scientists primarily study these worlds using large, ground-based telescopes, such as Keck Observatory, Gemini Observatory, and Europe’s Very Large Telescope, all of which use adaptive optics to sharpen the view. (In 2019, Uranus and Neptune will be best positioned for telescopic viewing in October and September, respectively.) Well-equipped amateur astronomers with larger telescopes can often identify localized storms of bright clouds crossing the planets’ tiny disks. With the Voyager flybys long since passed, today we’re stuck with studying the ice giants from the ground. Despite their cold temperatures, they still support giant storms, much like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot or Saturn’s large, seasonal outbreaks. Given their large distances from the Sun, Uranus and Neptune are much colder and have a higher abundance of atmospheric water and other ice-forming molecules, earning them the nickname “ice giants.” Ice giants are mostly water, probably in the form of a supercritical fluid the visible clouds likely consist of ice crystals with different compositions. The brief Voyager flybys revealed these 2 worlds to be quite different from Jupiter and Saturn, sometimes called the gas giants. Uranus and Neptune reside in a largely unexplored corner of the Sun’s realm, yet they are members of the most populous planetary mass range (50 to 100 Earth masses) based on our current knowledge of extrasolar systems. No other spacecraft have ventured there since. These historic flybys gave us our first detailed views of these intriguing worlds along with the rings and moons that surround them. Speeding toward its eventual escape from the solar system, Voyager 2 visited Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Tantalizing glimpses of moons with exotic, icy terrains.
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