NASA recently published unique images of Uranus, the blue giant planet, showing, for the first time, auroras on Uranus. The planet’s faint rings are also visible in the images.
Auroras are fascinating atmospheric glows, particularly observable in the polar regions. They occur when energetic charged particles from the Sun collide with atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Auroras have also been detected on Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.
Fig. 1 shows two observations of Uranus, acquired in November 2011, during a period of increased solar activity, when an intense stream of charged solar particles hit the Earth, Jupiter, and Uranus. The observations were acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a sophisticated observatory exploring the universe from Earth orbit.
Fig. 1 is a composite image produced by combining HST images of Uranus’ auroras in visual light and ultraviolet, images in visible light from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which visited Uranus in 1986, and infrared images of Uranus from the ground-based Gemini Observatory.
References
Hubble Site
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/21/image/a/
NASA
www.nasa.gov/
Wikipedia