Those white areas aren’t clouds; they’re aurorae—”northern lights”—around the poles of Uranus, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 and 2014. (The image of Uranus itself was acquired by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in January 1986.)

“The auroras on Jupiter and Saturn are well-studied, but not much is known about the auroras of the giant ice planet Uranus. In 2011, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope became the first Earth-based telescope to snap an image of the auroras on Uranus. In 2012 and 2014 a team led by an astronomer from Paris Observatory took a second look at the auroras using the ultraviolet capabilities of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) installed on Hubble.”

Aurorae on Uranus are driven by the same process that creates them around Earth’s polar regions: charged particles from the Sun get caught in the planet’s magnetic field and are focused toward the poles, where they make ions in the upper atmosphere release energy—in these observations in ultraviolet wavelengths. Also, since Uranus orbits the Sun “tilted sideways” its polar regions are near the plane of its orbit.

Read the rest of this article from NASA here: Hubble Spots Auroras on Uranus