New Hubble Pictures Show a Stormy Spring on Uranus

Springtime on Uranus is no picnic--it brings huge storms with brightly colored clouds and temperatures of 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, according to new pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. “No one has ever seen this view in the modern era of astronomy because of the long year of Uranus--more than 84 Earth years,” Heidi Hammel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. It will not be summer on Uranus until 2007, when the sun will be right over the planet’s equator.

When NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by Uranus in 1986, the planet appeared as featureless as a cue ball. But warming of its northern hemisphere is churning up clouds made of crystals of methane. Images are available at https://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html.

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Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II