What is the difference between neptune and uranus

The difference is greatest at high latitudes, where the clouds circle the poles in 14 hours, and it gets progressively smaller toward the equator, closer to the internal rotation period of Despite its great distance from the Sun, the dimly lit atmosphere of Neptune is one of the most turbulent in the solar system, with violent winds, large dark storms and high-altitude white clouds that come and go at different places and times.

And like Uranus, the polar and equatorial temperatures on Neptune are nearly equal. When the Hubble Space Telescope took another look at the planet, in to , the violent storms seen by the Voyager 2 cameras had vanished without a trace, and other storms had appeared. The largest dark storms on Neptune are probably high-pressure systems that come and go with atmospheric circulation. The most prominent one was the Great Dark Spot, a vast, circulating storm almost as large as Earth.

Both storms are found in the planetary tropics - at about one-quarter of the way from the equator to the south pole, both rotate counterclockwise, in the direction of high-pressure anticyclones, and both are about the same size relative to their planet. As on Jupiter, some of the small dark spots on Neptune may be whirling in the opposite direction to the bigger one, perhaps indicating that they are little cyclones with descending material at their centers. There are some important differences between the two Great Spots.

White, fleecy cirrus-like clouds cast shadows on the blue cloud deck below, indicating that they are high-altitude condensation clouds that rise about kilometers above the surrounding ones. They form as atmospheric gas flows up, over and around the storm center, without being consumed by it.

When the rising methane gas cools, it forms white clouds, fashioned from crystals of frozen methane. Solar heating of the atmosphere and oceans drives the terrestrial winds. The internal heat warms Neptune from the inside out, producing convecting currents of rising and falling material, somewhat like a pot of boiling water on a stove.

Uranus, on the other hand, shows no signs of substantial internal heating, and this may explain why its atmosphere is relatively benign and inactive. The tenuous gas forms an extensive hydrogen corona around Uranus, but is held closer to the cloud tops above Neptune. The overwhelming abundance of hydrogen in the outer atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune resembles that in Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun. Unlike Jupiter and Saturn, however, Uranus and Neptune cannot consist mostly of the lightest element hydrogen, or they would have a lower mean mass density then observed.

For their size, Uranus and Neptune are too massive for hydrogen to be their main ingredient, and their bulk must instead be composed of heavier abundant elements. To put it another way, both planets are too small for their mass to be mainly composed of hydrogen and helium, and must consist mainly of heavier material.

Since Uranus and Neptune have similar mass, size, composition and rotation, their interiors are also expected to be alike. But they must be quite different from Jupiter and Saturn inside. The hydrogen in Uranus and Neptune is confined within a thin atmosphere and liquid molecular shell that do not extend to great depths and contribute only about 15 percent of the planetary mass.

These two planets do not have enough hydrogen, or sufficient mass and internal pressure, to squeeze the hydrogen into a metallic state. So there is no internal shell of liquid metallic hydrogen inside Uranus and Neptune. Although customarily denoted as ices, since they would be frozen at the cloud tops of these planets, these substances are kept liquid by the high temperatures, up to 8, degrees kelvin, deep in the planetary interiors.

These molecules will form from atoms of hydrogen, H, oxygen, O, carbon, C, and nitrogen, N, the most abundant heavy elements in the material from which the Sun and giant planets originated. Uranus and Neptune are not unlike the cores of Jupiter and Saturn, which similarly contain 10 to 20 Earth masses of melted ice and molten rock.

But Uranus and Neptune are almost all core, without the deep envelope of hydrogen and helium that make up most of the mass of Jupiter and Saturn. The differences between these four planets apparently derive primarily from the amounts of hydrogen and helium that they were able to attract and hold as they formed. But the resemblance ends there. Here on Earth our magnetic pole is very near our geographic pole, which is very useful for navigation with a compass. The magnetic and rotational axes of Jupiter and Saturn are also closely aligned.

There is nothing easier than visualizing the differences in a table, the bigger or larger number is underlined:. There are measurements that Uranus wins and those which Neptune wins. They are most similar when it comes to diameter; less than a hundred miles separates the two planets.

Neptune is tilted at Comparably, Neptune enjoys moderate weather, but its orbit of Earth years stretches each season for 40 long years. It is also the only large moon in the solar system to rotate in a direction opposite to that of its host planet.

During her talk, Hammel laid out numerous reasons for sending spacecraft back to these icy outer worlds. The ice giants, she explained, have interiors that differ fundamentally from those of rocky planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Instead, they are made of ices, which in astronomical terms are mixtures of various frozen stuff.

Hammel went on to explain that our knowledge of Uranus is especially limited because of the timing of the Voyager 2 flyby. This is very unusual for a planet, and unfortunately it meant that Uranus was in its southern solstice when Voyager 2 made its nearest approach.

By , when the 10 m diameter ground-based Keck telescope was trained on Uranus, it was a different story. Instead of a smooth, pale-blue dot, the Keck images showed popcorn-like clouds similar to the ones the Cassini spacecraft saw on Saturn.

Similarly, an image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope in showed dark bands that were absent when Voyager 2 made its historic visit. Neptune, in contrast, was plenty active during its Voyager 2 flyby in The dark spot was still absent in , when Neptune was imaged again, but by it — or, rather, something like it — had reappeared. At present, no mission is scheduled for either of the ice giants. Perhaps the most obvious difference between the ice giants is their rotation angles.

The spin of the planet Uranus is tilted by about 98 degrees compared to its orbital plane. Meanwhile, Neptune and most of the solar system's other planets have rotations that are more or less aligned with their orbits though Venus likewise rotates the "wrong" way.

The two ice giants have other major differences, too, like the fact that Neptune seems to have some heat source warming it from the inside, while Uranus probably does not. Past studies have suggested that giant impacts might explain the tilted spin of Uranus, while also accounting for other differences between the ice giants. The researchers found that if Neptune experienced a head-on collision with some large rocky body in its past, it could have deposited some extra energy deep inside the planet that's been slowly seeping out as heat over time.

This, they think, could be the source of the extra warmth that's radiating out of Neptune's interior. For Uranus, the models show that a grazing or oblique impact from another rocky object could explain the planet's tilt, as well as the odd orbital properties of its moons.