This is alarming:
Pasadena (UPI) - A U.S.-led international team of astronomers discovered that Neptune’s south pole is much warmer than the rest of the planet.
The researchers published the first temperature maps of the lowest portion of Neptune’s atmosphere, showing the warmer south pole is providing an avenue for methane to escape from the deep atmosphere.
“The temperatures are so high that methane gas, which should be frozen out in the upper part of Neptune’s atmosphere, the stratosphere, can leak out through this region,” said Glenn Orton of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Orton is lead author of a paper appearing in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. In the paper, the astronomers report the temperature at Neptune’s south pole is higher than anywhere else on the planet by about 18 degrees Fahrenheit. The average temperature on Neptune is about minus 392 degrees Fahrenheit.
The findings were made using the Very Large Telescope located in Chile, operated by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere.
I hope Al Gore is on the case. I just know SUVs are somehow involved… More