The outermost ring of the planet Uranus turns out to have a bright blue color, according to a report in the April 7 issue of the journal Science.
Neptune: The Blue Planet | NASA.
Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun. This close-up view of Saturn's rings shows that many tiny rings make up the larger rings around the planet.
Dark, cold, and whipped by supersonic winds, ice giant Neptune is the eighth and most distant planet in our solar system. More than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth, Neptune is the only planet in our solar system not visible to the naked eye.
The blue rings of Saturn and Uranus both are associated with small moons. According to recent research, the particles in the planet's blue ring are likely produced by impacts on Mab, one of Uranus' smallest moons.
The predominant blue color of the planet is a result of the absorption of red and infrared light by Neptune's methane atmosphere. Clouds elevated above most of the methane absorption appear white, while the very highest clouds tend to be yellow-red as seen in the bright feature at the top of the right-hand image.
Pluto's visual apparent magnitude averages 15.1, brightening to 13.65 at perihelion. In other words, the planet has a range of colors, including pale sections of off-white and light blue, to streaks of yellow and subtle orange, to large patches of deep red.
In the evening, 4 planets are visible – Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus – with Venus and Saturn near each other and near the sunset, and Jupiter and Mars higher in the sky as night begins.
Light rays here travel a much longer path through the relatively cloud-free upper atmosphere. Along this path, shorter wavelength blue light rays are scattered effectively by gases in the atmosphere, and it is this scattered light that gives the region its blue appearance.
The Blue Ring Nebula marks the site where two stars merged and ejected a cloud of debris. A gaseous disk around the primary star cut this cloud in half, creating of two expanding cones of debris, one moving toward Earth and one moving away.
How to see Neptune (and Mars, Saturn and Jupiter) Get your self a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. “You will need at minimum of a pair of binoculars, but they don't have to be large—any kind will do the trick,” said Kerss. “In binoculars it looks like a star, but its blueness does standout in a dark sky.”
Hubble has identified the true visible-light color of a giant Jupiter-sized planet located 63 light-years away. The planet has a cobalt blue color. It has torrential 4,500-mile-per-hour winds that are so hot they melt silicates into raindrops of molten glass. And that's where the cobalt-blue hue comes from, not oceans.
The color of Neptune is a bright azure blue. During its flyby in 1989, NASA's Voyager 2 revealed the bright blue color, different from the pale blue color of Uranus.
The blue color comes from complex organic molecules in Pluto's atmosphere called tholins, which are themselves probably gray or red but scatter light in blue wavelengths, New Horizons team members said. The same basic phenomenon explains why Earth's sky is blue.
About This Image
In this photo, the parts of Jupiter's atmosphere that are at higher altitude, especially over the poles, look red from atmospheric particles absorbing ultraviolet light. Conversely, the blue-hued areas represent the ultraviolet light being reflected off the planet.
Viewed from Earth, Saturn has an overall hazy yellow-brown appearance. The surface that is seen through telescopes and in spacecraft images is actually a complex of cloud layers decorated by many small-scale features, such as red, brown, and white spots, bands, eddies, and vortices, that vary over a fairly short time.
Venus. After the Moon, Venus is the brightest natural object in the night sky. It is both the Earth's closest neighbor in our Solar System and the planet most similar to Earth in size, gravity, and composition.
Our moon orbits Earth, so Earth is closest to the moon at about 384,000. Other than Earth, the closest planet would be Venus at about 38 million km away. Was this answer helpful?
Venus is currently in the constellation of Capricornus. The current Right Ascension is 20h 51m 58s and the Declination is -19° 11' 55”.
Viewed through a telescope, Venus presents a brilliant yellow-white, essentially featureless face to the observer. Its obscured appearance results from the surface of the planet being hidden from sight by a continuous and permanent cover of clouds. Features in the clouds are difficult to see in visible light.
But what makes them take on all their various hues, and why does each one look so different? The planets of the solar system are varied in their appearance. Mercury is slate gray while Venus is pearly white, Earth a vibrant blue, and Mars a dusky red.
The outer atmosphere of Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium, with some water droplets, ice crystals, and ammonia crystals. When these elements form clouds, they create shades of white, orange, brown, and red, the colors of Jupiter.
The blue-green color results from the absorption of red light by methane gas in Uranus' deep, cold and remarkably clear atmosphere.
The outermost ring of the planet Uranus turns out to have a bright blue color, according to a report in the April 7 issue of the journal Science. That makes it only the second blue ring to be found in the solar system.