Complex Numbers

At Last

Last year, I featured several articles about planets. Over time, I hit every one... except this one, which has been languishing in obscurity due to the inherent randomness of life. Well, not life, but my system. Anyway, here it is, published way back in September of 2019:

    A Love Letter to the Last Planet  
Neptune really deserves more attention, if you ask me.

Oh, it deserves more attention, does it? Well, I can't disagree, but it's not like we can just stroll over there.

You see, I fell in love with Neptune as a kid, back when I was in the second grade.

Dude, I like astronomy too, but he's too old for you.

We all had to read about a planet and tell a few sentences about why we liked it. I got assigned Neptune.

What if you turned out not to like it? Huh? Did the teacher ever think of that? "Jupiter's pretty, but its radiation would kill anyone within a million miles." "Everyone's fascinated by Mars, but there's nothing there." Or, you know, phrased the way a second-grader would.

And what if the teacher made them draw the planet? I mean, most planets are pretty easy. Circle. Appropriate color. Lots of black background. But whoever got Saturn would be in trouble.

Anyway.

In August of 1989, when Voyager 2 started sending back the first clear pictures of Neptune and its moons, the mysteries began giving way to marvels. Neptune is a world of giant methane storms and strange rings.

Coincidentally, I read an article recently which noted that the Voyager 2 pictures were false-color, giving Neptune a much deeper blue than it would actually appear to have in the unlikely event that there was a human hanging out nearby. Ah, here it is.   Looks way more like that other planet, the one I won't name.

So, then the article goes into some of the things we know about Neptune, and they are indeed Amazing Science Facts (well, to the extent that anything we know can be).

Something else even more wondrous happens in those deep layers of superionic ice. Carbon atoms get squeezed out of the methane molecules mixed in with the water, creating clumps of crystallized carbon. You probably know crystallized carbon by its more common name, diamond. According to laboratory simulations, the diamonds inside Neptune could have grown to be a meter wide. They are denser than the surrounding ices, so they sink downward toward the planet’s core.

That’s right: Inside Neptune, it is raining meter-wide diamonds.

Somewhere out there, according to some astronomers, is at least one entire planet made of diamond. I don't know, maybe it was like Neptune, but got too close to a star and its lighter materials blew away. Point being, diamonds aren't as rare on Earth as they try to convince us they are; and Out There, they're probably even less rare.

A diamond deserves a ring, and Neptune has several of them — five of them, in fact. Unlike Saturn’s rings, these are thin, dark structures around the planet, too dim to be observed clearly from Earth.

I also recently saw a JWST image of... you know, that other ice giant, which also has rings. Spectacular image.   That telescope was meant to peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, and yet they pointed it at what's, comparatively speaking, right next door.

Look, I'm purposely avoiding the puns, here. Just pretend I've already made the one you're thinking of.

So yeah, my adult self agrees with my 8-year-old self that Neptune is a fascinating place. Voyager 2 gave us only a taste of what it’s really all about. And Neptune is just the prototype of a whole class of Neptune-size planets that appear to be common around other stars.

When Voyager 2 did its thing, we had no evidence for planets around other stars. I mean, sure, we figured they had to be there, but no direct evidence. Now, we've found thousands.

In general, the more we know, the more we understand. Sure, there are probably higher priorities than a mission to Neptune. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.