Imaging Uranus at Submillimeter to Centimeter Wavelengths

Details Imaging Uranus at Submillimeter to Centimeter Wavelengths Imaging Uranus at Submillimeter to Centimeter Wavelengths

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.0907h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #9.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.424

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We have been making regular observations of Uranus for the past several years, in part to search for variability associated with the 2007 equinox. We will present an analysis of our current data set, spanning wavelengths from 1 mm to 20 cm (using the SMA and VLA radio observatories), including our latest data collected in August of 2007. These wavelengths probe the atmosphere from pressures of 1 to 50 bars, which extends from the lower tropopause far into convectively dominated regions, and includes several altitudes of cloud formation.
We have found that, at all our wavelengths, the planet appears symmetric, with both the north (spring) and south (fall) polar regions being radio bright. At pressures greater than a few bars, this is almost certainly due to the poles being depleted in atmospheric absorbers by convective processes (Hofstadter and Butler 2003, Icarus 165, 168-180). Near 1 bar, the bright poles could be due to the physical temperature being 5 K higher there than at the equator, or due to a strong depletion of CH4 vapor over the poles. A combination of the two seems likely, as compositional variations are consistent with the circulation inferred from several data sets, and 2 K temperature variations are found both in theoretical models (Friedson and Ingersoll 1987, Icarus 69, 135-156) and in Voyager infrared measurements made in 1986 during southern summer solstice (Hanel et al. 1986, Science 233, 70-74).
We will discuss these results in the context of observations of Uranus made at other wavelengths, and recent images we have acquired of Neptune at radio wavelengths. This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. We acknowledge the support of NASA's Planetary Astronomy program, and of the VLA and SMA observatories.

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