Uranus’ storms puzzle astronomers

Astronomers have spotted a slew of squalls on Uranus, a usually quiet, distant planet – two of them giant storms that took astronomers by surprise.

The findings, presented last week at the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Tucson, Arizona, show that the mysterious, blandly blue planet might be far more complicated than scientists had thought.

Team lead Imke de Pater, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, said she and colleagues first spotted the strange activity in August while using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study weather patterns on Uranus – which they had been doing regularly for more than a decade.

To their surprise, they saw eight large storms.

“It was just by chance I was observing and noticed these incredible storms that we really had never seen before,” de Pater said in an interview.

These storms on a usually quiet Uranus have astronomers scratching their heads, de Pater said.

The three other gassy giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune – all seem to have strong internal heat sources, and that energy could help stir up storms in the atmosphere.

But Uranus doesn’t appear to have one.

“Well, at least it tells us that the theories have to be adjusted,” de Pater said. “They are not representative of reality.”