All the planets in our solar system have seasons! Earth has four seasons. Most planets do, too. They are called winter, spring, summer and fall...but the seasons are different on each planet. On Venus, seasons are short. On Saturn, a season can last for seven years. And on Mercury, you can't even tell when one season ends and the next one begins and Pluto is too far away. We don't know about its seasons. Seasons on Other Planets PLANET LENGTH OF SEASON Venus 55-58 days Earth 90-93 days Mars 7 months Jupiter 3 years Saturn About 7 years Uranus About 20 years Neptune More than 40 years Some of you are probably considering Christmas on Mars....7 months of yule-tide cheer! What about Saturn? It's seasons last 7 years!! Since Saturn takes 30 years to orbit the Sun, so it’s seasons are much, much longer than Earth’s. Each of the planet’s hemispheres take turns soaking up radiation from the Sun, heating up. When the rings are fully facing the Sun, they can shade the planet, and further decrease the amount of energy received by the hemisphere experiencing winter Let's think a little crazy...what would the seasons be like on Uranus?? Uranus, like Earth, has four seasons. But the seasons on Earth and Uranus are very different. For starters, the length of Uranus’ seasons are different from ours. It takes Earth 365 days to orbit around the sun, but it takes Uranus 84 Earth-years, more or less. So Uranus year is 84 Earth-years along, and each season on Uranus lasts 21 earthly years. (You might need to read that again...) Uranus, like Earth, has a nearly circular orbit, so it remains at the same distance from the sun throughout its long year. It’s the planet’s tilt that gives Uranus its seasons, just as Earth’s seasons are caused by our world’s tilt on its axis. But the tilts of our planets are different. While Earth orbits nearly upright, Uranus is lying down nearly sideways with respect to its orbit around the sun. (https://earthsky.org/space/what-are-the-seasons-like-on-uranus) The axis of Uranus is tilted at an angle of 98 degrees, when you look at its orbit. Earth has a midnight sun in summer at its poles, and a long polar night in winter. But those dark and bright times at Earth’s poles affect a smaller part of our planet, and don’t last nearly as long as they do on Uranus. For two 21-year seasons on Uranus – the winter-summer seasons – the poles of Uranus are pointed (more or less) either toward the sun, or away from it. During Uranus’ winter-summer season, the winter side of the planet never sees the sun. It doesn’t see the sun for 21 long years. Meanwhile, the summer side of the planet has continuous daylight. That’s a long polar night, and a long midnight sun! During the planet’s spring and fall, a large percentage of the planet has day and night – a shift between daylight and darkness – again and again about every 17 hours. So, for much of the planet, where there had been continuous day or continuous night lasting decades (1 decade=10 years) on an earthly scale, now there’s a fast change between day and night. As technologies for observing Uranus from Earth (or Earth-orbit) have become more powerful – and as Uranus moved in its 84-year orbit around the sun – we’ve seen the seasons on Uranus change. Above is a photo of a big storm forming on Uranus that is about as big as the United States as it approaches it's equinox; fall. When the Voyager observed Uranus going out of the dead of winter into full-on summer the light and warmth in the atmosphere triggered gigantic storms comparable in size to North America (but with temperatures of 300° below zero), visible as bright spots in the planet’s atmosphere. Seasons on Uranus are absolutely crazy!
9 Comments
|
Mrs. TaylorI love science! Everything about the world is interesting and never boring. I love to study plants, animals, insects, and people. My favorite subjects are my students who are the most unique organisms on the planet! Categories |