Hey space fans! 🚀 Guess what? Scientists just found out that a day on Uranus is a little longer than we thought! 🌌
Using ten years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, a team of scientists led by Laurent Lamy from the Paris Observatory discovered that Uranus takes 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 52 seconds to complete one full rotation. That’s 28 seconds longer than what NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft measured way back in the 1980s. 🕒
So, why does this matter? Understanding how fast a planet spins helps scientists learn more about its insides, like its core and atmosphere. 🌐
The team studied the planet’s auroras—kind of like the Northern Lights we have on Earth! By watching these glowing lights near Uranus’s magnetic poles over a decade, they figured out exactly how fast the planet is spinning. Isn’t that cool? 🌈
Oh, and did you know Uranus is so far from the Sun that it takes about 84 Earth years to orbit it once? That’s like a whole lifetime! ☀️
This exciting discovery was published in the journal Nature Astronomy, just in time to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 35th anniversary. 🎉 Hubble has been helping us explore the universe since NASA’s space shuttle Discovery launched it into orbit on April 24, 1990.
Space is full of surprises, and who knows what we’ll find out next? Keep looking up! 🌠
Reference(s):
cgtn.com
