Uranus is an oddity among the planets of our solar system. Where other planets spin around an axis roughly in line with their orbital axis, Uranus spins on its side, placing its poles in line with the sun. On Earth, the polar regions are naturally colder the equator, but that doesn’t hold true for Uranus. Yet new observations of the ice giant show that it, like the other planets with atmospheres in our solar system, has a polar cyclone.
Those observations are thanks to improvements in radio astronomy over the past couple decades. Uranus’s odd orbital geometry means that each of its poles are hidden from Earth for 42 years at a time; the current northern-hemisphere spring marks our first view of Uranus’s northern pole since 1965. In the recent observations, researchers saw a bright spot on the pole, surrounded by a faint darker ring. The team modeled the temperature and gas composition necessary to match their observations and found that those patterns were consistent with a cyclone sitting at the northern pole. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/VLA; research credit: A. Akins et al.; via Physics Today)