Basic astronomical data
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Having an orbital period of 164.79 years, Neptune has circled the Sun only once since its discovery in September 1846. Consequently, astronomers expect to be making refinements in calculating its orbital size and shape well into the 21st century. Voyager 2’s encounter with Neptune resulted in a small upward revision of the planet’s estimated mean distance from the Sun, which is now thought to be 4,498,250,000 km (2,795,083,000 miles). Its orbital eccentricity of 0.0086 is the second lowest of the planets; only Venus’s orbit is more circular. Neptune’s rotation axis is tipped toward its orbital plane by 29.6°, somewhat larger than Earth’s 23.4°. As on Earth, the axial tilt gives rise to seasons on Neptune, and, because of the circularity of Neptune’s orbit, the seasons (and the seasons of its moons) are of nearly equal length, each nearly 41 years in duration.
Neptune’s rotation period was established when Voyager 2 detected radio bursts associated with the planet’s magnetic field and having a period of 16.11 hours. This value was inferred to be the rotation period at the level of the planet’s interior where the magnetic field is rooted. Neptune’s equatorial diameter measured at the one-bar pressure level (the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level) is 49,528 km (30,775 miles), which is only about 3 percent shy of the diameter of Uranus. Because of a flattening of the poles caused by the planet’s relatively fast rotation, Neptune’s polar diameter is 848 km (527 miles) less than its diameter at the equator. Although Neptune occupies a little less volume than Uranus, owing to its greater density—1.64 grams per cubic cm, compared with about 1.3 for Uranus—Neptune’s mass is 18 percent higher. For additional orbital and physical data about Neptune, see the table.
The atmosphere
Like the other giant planets, Neptune’s outer atmosphere is composed predominantly of hydrogen and helium. Near the one-bar pressure level in the atmosphere, these two gases contribute nearly 98 percent of the atmospheric molecules. Most of the remaining molecules consist of methane gas. Hydrogen and helium are nearly invisible, but methane strongly absorbs red light. Sunlight reflected off Neptune’s clouds therefore exits the atmosphere with most of its red colours removed and so has a bluish cast. Although Uranus’s blue-green colour is also the result of atmospheric methane, Neptune’s colour is a more vivid, brighter blue, presumably an effect of the presence of an unidentified atmospheric gas.
The temperature of Neptune’s atmosphere varies with altitude. A minimum temperature of about 50 kelvins (K; −370 °F, −223 °C) occurs at a pressure near 0.1 bar. The temperature increases with decreasing pressure—i.e., with increasing altitude—to about 750 K (890 °F, 480 °C) at a pressure of a hundred-billionth of a bar, which corresponds to an altitude of 2,000 km (1,240 miles) as measured from the one-bar level, and it remains uniform above that altitude. Temperatures also increase with increasing depth below the 0.1-bar level to about 7,000 K (12,000 °F, 6,700 °C) near the centre of the planet, where the pressure may reach five megabars. The total amount of energy radiated by Neptune is equivalent to that of a nonreflecting sphere of the same size with a uniform temperature of 59.3 K (−353 °F, −214 °C). This temperature is called the effective temperature.
Neptune is more than 50 percent farther from the Sun than is Uranus and so receives less than half the sunlight of the latter. Yet the effective temperatures of these two giant planets are nearly equal. Uranus and Neptune each reflect—and hence also must absorb—about the same proportion of the sunlight that reaches them. As a result of processes not fully understood, Neptune emits more than twice the energy that it receives from the Sun. The added energy is generated in Neptune’s interior. Uranus, by contrast, has little energy escaping from its interior.
At the one-bar reference level, the mean temperature of Neptune’s atmosphere is roughly 74 K (−326 °F, −199 °C). Atmospheric temperatures are a few degrees warmer at the equator and poles than at mid-latitudes. This is probably an indication that air currents are rising near mid-latitudes and descending near the equator and poles. This vertical flow may extend to great heights within the atmosphere. A more vertically confined horizontal wind system exists near the cloud tops. As with the other giant planets, Neptune’s atmospheric circulation exhibits zonal flow—the winds are constrained to blow generally along lines of constant latitude (east-west) and are relatively invariable with time. Winds on Neptune range from about 100 metres per second (360 km [220 miles] per hour) in an easterly direction (prograde, or in the same direction as the planet’s spin) near latitude 70° S to as high as 700 metres per second (2,520 km [1,570 miles] per hour) in a westerly direction (retrograde, or opposite to the planet’s spin) near latitude 20° S.
The high winds and relatively large amount of escaping internal heat may be responsible for the turbulence observed in Neptune’s visible atmosphere by Voyager 2. Two large dark ovals were clearly visible in Voyager images of Neptune’s southern hemisphere. The largest, called the Great Dark Spot because of its similarity in latitude and shape to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, is comparable to Earth in size. It was near this storm system that the highest wind speeds were measured. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been seen in Earth-based telescopes for more than 150 years. Neptune’s Great Dark Spot was expected by analogy to be similarly long-lived. Scientists thus were surprised by its absence from images of Neptune obtained by the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope in 1991, only two years after the Voyager flyby, just as they were by the appearance of a comparable dark spot in Neptune’s northern hemisphere in 1994. Bright cloud features seen in the Voyager images are even more transient; they may be methane ice clouds created by strong upward motions of pockets of methane gas to higher, colder altitudes in the atmosphere, where the gas then condenses to ice crystals.
Neptune is the only giant planet to display cloud shadows cast by high dispersed clouds on a lower, more continuous cloud bank. The higher clouds, probably composed of methane ice crystals, are generally located 50–100 km (30–60 miles) above the main cloud deck, which may be composed of ice crystals of ammonia or hydrogen sulfide. Like the other giant planets, Neptune is thought to possess cloud layers at deeper levels, below those visible to Voyager’s remote sensing instruments, but their composition is dependent on the relative amounts of gases composed of compounds of sulfur and nitrogen. Clouds of water ice are expected to occur at depths within Neptune’s atmosphere where the pressure exceeds 100 bars.