Hubble Space Telescope

• PASADENA, CA, Feb. 20, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Giant Magellan Telescope today welcomes Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), a distinguished Taiwanese research institute, into its international consortium.
• ASIAA's inclusion expands the consortium to 14 international research institutions, underscoring Giant Magellan’s significance to the global astronomy community and the consortium’s commitment to prioritizing global collaboration for the advancement of science.
• “We are thrilled to welcome ASIAA into our international consortium of distinguished partners,” said Dr. Walter Massey, Board Chair of the Giant Magellan Telescope.
• This collective investment in the Giant Magellan Telescope is a testament that science can transcend boundaries and bind humanity together for good.”
  The astronomical research and instrumental development capabilities in Taiwan have received international recognition.

• But now our new study, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, has revealed that these two ice giants are actually very similar shades of greenish blue.
• These were recorded in 2002 (Uranus) and 2003 (Neptune).
• We found that the colours of Uranus and Neptune were actually remarkably similar, with Neptune appearing only slightly bluer – see the image below.

Reconstructing the colours

• Our reconstructed colours of Uranus and Neptune look very different from previous images, which come from the Voyager 2 spacecraft’s encounters with these planets in 1986 and 1989 respectively.
• So, did the colours of Uranus and Neptune change between the late 1980s and early 2000s?
• Both of these instruments record images where each individual pixel is a complete, continuous spectrum covering all colours that can be seen with the human eye – making them more accurate than spacecraft when it comes to colour.
• This allowed us to determine unambiguously the actual colour that the human eye would perceive for Uranus and Neptune.

Uranus changes colour

Comparing the true colour of Uranus in 1986 with more recent observations, it became clear that Uranus in 1986 was actually slightly greener than it was in the early 2000s. We tried to determine why this was the case by turning to observations made between 1950 and 2016 at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. These observations contained the overall brightness of Uranus and Neptune almost annually at two wavelengths: green and blue.

• This revealed that Uranus does change colour, becoming greener at the solstices (when the Sun’s path in the sky is the farthest north or south from the planet’s equator) than it is at the equinoxes (when the Sun’s path crosses the planet’s equator).
• Part of the reason for this colour change is that Uranus spins almost on its side during its 84-year orbit about the Sun.
• This modified model then substantially reproduced the Lowell observations and thus explains how the overall colour of Uranus changes during its orbit about the Sun.

Patrick Gerard Joseph Irwin has received funding related to this study from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.

• Dr. Feustel is a veteran NASA Astronaut with 23 years of experience, most recently as NASA’s acting Chief Astronaut.
• Prior to that role, he served as the Deputy Chief of the Astronaut Office from 2020 to 2022.
• Dr. Feustel joins an esteemed list of advisors at Vast, which includes veteran NASA astronaut Dr. Garrett Reisman.
• “We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Feustel to our team and look forward to learning from his expansive spaceflight experience,” said Max Haot, CEO.

• Cilium is an eBPF-based project that was originally created by Isovalent, open-sourced in 2015, and has become the center of gravity for cloud native networking and security.
• Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium is the hardened, enterprise-grade, and 24×7-supported version of the eBPF-based cloud networking platform Cilium.
• Tetragon is an eBPF-based security observability and runtime enforcement platform designed to give security and operations teams richer telemetry data for runtime security, while eliminating the performance overhead of proprietary security vendors' agents.
• With its Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium 1.14 release, Isovalent extends the open source project with enterprise features that further security teams visibility into L7 networking events (HTTP, DNS, TLS/SSL handshake analysis), granular control over Tetragon security policies and workflows, improved in-kernel smart collection for lower CPU & memory overhead, and more.