REAL LIFE NEWS: PROBING URANUS
By Hazed
A massive storm hit the planet Uranus in early August, and astronomers were able to watch using a telescope on Hawaii. The storm caused a bright spot to appear on the planet, which is usually so dark it’s hard to spot it from Earth.
This bright spot accounted for 30% of the light that’s usually reflected by the whole planet, and indicates that the massive storm was causing serious disruption to the planet’s upper atmosphere.
Experts are baffled as to why Uranus is suddenly suffering such storms. Heidi Hammel of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy said, “This type of activity would have been expected in 2007, when Uranus’s once every 42-year equinox occurred and the Sun shined directly on the equator. But we predicted that such activity would have died down by now. Why we see these incredible storms now is beyond anybody’s guess.”
Amateur astronomers were able to take photos of this intense storm, too, and the clarity of those images convinced the operators of the Hubble Space Telescope that it was worth taking a look. The resulting images were, apparently, quite remarkable, showing multiple storms raging over more than 5.760 miles at a variety of altitudes.
