Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Bogelbaum Here. Unless you're a pilot or a member of the Justice League, anything that can travel at seven and seventy miles per hour or about one hundred kilometers per hour might seem pretty darn fast on a lukewarm day when atmospheric conditions are normal. That's the approximate speed of sound at Earth's sea level, but the wind speeds on Neptune can put this figure to shame.
Some neptune and winds have been clocked it faster than one thousand, two hundred miles or two thousand kilometers per hour. To date, these are the fastest winds recorded anywhere in the Solar System. Neptune's location makes them all the more interesting. Here on Earth, the Sun's energy is what drives our winds, Yet Neptune is the eighth planet in the Solar System, about thirty times farther away from the Sun than we are.
The gap between Neptune and our star is a staggering two point eight billion miles or four point five billion kilometers wide. Due to this vast divide, Neptune gets relatively little solar energy so one might expect it to have weak or non existent winds. The fact that the opposite is true reflects the dynamic and mysterious composition of this truly alien world. Astronomers used to divide the planets into
two broad categories. The first, called the terrestrial planets, included Mercury, Earth, Venus, and Mars. All four bodies mostly consist of metals or silicate rocks, and they've got solid outer surfaces. Before the nineteen nineties, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were lumped together into the second group, the gas giants. Giant is certainly an appropriate label. Jupiter is easily the biggest planet in our Solar system, but Neptune isn't doing too bad for itself.
It has a radius of fifteen thousand, three hundred miles, which is about twenty four thousand, six hundred kilometers, making it four times wider than Earth. By the turn of the twenty first century, however, scientists realized that half of these alleged gas giants are fundamentally different from the other half. True, all four bodies lack solid exteriors, but Jupiter and Saturn
are predominantly made of hydrogen and helium gas. The same cannot be said of Uranus or Neptune, whose major components are actually heavier elements Beneath a sparse outer layer of helium, hydrogen, and methane. Both worlds have a thick mantle. This layer is loaded with slushy, semi frozen water, ammonia, and methane. Further down, each planet's got an inner core that might be rocky and approximately Earth sized. So today Uranus and
Neptune are no longer considered gas giants. Instead, they've been switched to a third category of planets that astronomers call ice giants. You wouldn't mistake one ice giant for the other, though Uranus looks pale blue green to our eyes, whereas Neptune has a deeper royal blue complexion. Both planets contain atmospheric clouds of methane, which simultaneously absorb red light waves and reflect blue ones. This is what gives the two ice giants their bluish color schemes, but it doesn't explain
why Neptune is visibly darker in hue. Perhaps there's a mystery ingredient hanging out in the Neptunian atmosphere. However, below their respective atmospheres. Scientists theorize that high heat and pressure forge diamonds, which presumably come raining down out of those methane clouds. But here's another key distinction. Urinus doesn't release much excess heat into space, yet Neptune, like Jupiter and Saturn, emits more energy than it receives from the Sun. Even so,
Neptune is considered the Solar System's coldest planet. In some parts of the outer atmosphere, temperatures are liable to hit negative two hundred and eighteen degrees celsius, which is a negative three and sixty degrees fahrenheit. Maybe that helps account for Neptune's ultra fast wind speeds. The atmospheric chill is thought to reduce friction, allowing winds to zip around more freely.
Speaking of weather patterns, when the Voyager to spacecraft visited Neptune in nine, it photographed an oval shaped storm some eight thousand miles or thirteen thousand kilometers across, nicknamed the Great Dark Spot. It vanished by the time the Hubble space telescope took a new round of pictures into altogether half a dozen Neptunean storm systems of this kind have
been documented. Research published in twenty nineteen indicates the storm's last for about two to six years apiece, compared to Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a tempest that's been going strong since at least the year eighteen thirty. This is a fairly short lifespan. Lots of interesting things are happening above Neptune as well. The ice giant has fourteen known moons, including one that wasn't discovered until this newcomer. Is named Hippocamp in honor of an aquatic beast from Greek mythology.
Neptune borrows its own name from the Roman god of the sea. For that reason, astronomers like to name the planets moons after mythic characters with ties to this deity, his Greek counterpart, Poseidon, or the ocean in general. In mythology, one of Poseidon's sons was the trumpet blowing merman. Triton, his namesake moon, is Neptune's largest, at one thousand, seven hundred miles that's kilometers in diameter, It's bigger than the dwarf planet Pluto. Triton is also the only large moon
in the entire Solar System with a retrograde orbit. When it circles Neptune, it moves in the opposite direction of the planet's spin. To add further intrigue, Triton has active Geyser's, a rarity in our cosmic neighborhood. Over time, Neptune might have lost a few satellites. Along with Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, the planet has its own personal ring system. Astronomers have identified five main rings own Neptune, and just beyond these lie some orbiting clumps of dusty material, dark and faint.
The rings of Neptune are presumed to be younger than Uranus is. According to Universe Today, they might be the remains of a moon that was somehow destroyed. Unlike every other planet in our solar system, Neptune is never visible to the naked eye. Yet when it was first spotted via telescope in the year eighteen forty six, the discovery didn't come as a surprise. Keen observers had noticed certain irregularities in Uranus's orbit. As the seventh planet moved around
the Sun, it was deviating from its anticipated pathway. So in the early eighteenth century, mathematicians reasoned that a large celestial body must be gravitationally tugging on Uranus, and they were right. Neptune was the culprit. The existence of this azure world, with its savage winds and disappearing storms, was predicted by math students. Let that fact inspire you when those math tests roll around. Today's episode was written by
Mark Mancini and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,