For decades, scientists have witnessed swirling clouds and violent winds in the atmospheres of ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Voyager data in the 1980s revealed that the pair actually has some of the strongest east-west jet streams in the solar system.

But scientists’ understanding of these planets’ atmospheric circulations stopped there; they didn’t know whether shallow processes or dynamics extending far into the interior powered the jet streams. Based on new computer simulations and numerical analysis to Voyager data, however, astronomers have put an upper limit on Uranus’ and Neptune’s active weather zones.

The planetary scientists centered these findings off the planets’ respective gravity fields, which they predicted based on recent deep circulation theories developed by co-authors Yohai Kaspi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Adam Showman of 11A.

“The reason we can constrain the weather to the upper 680 miles or so is that we would see a much stronger distortion of the gravitational field if the weather extended much deeper”, William Hubards says (University of Arizona).

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