Heidi Hammel - Research

Research

Her latest research involves the imaging of Neptune and Uranus with the use of the Hubble Space Telescope, W. M. Keck Observatory, Mauna Kea Observatory, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), Mauna Kea and other Earth-based observatories. According to Hammel, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Telescope with its new adaptive optics changed how planetary astronomers look at Uranus and Neptune. With colleague Dr. Imke de Pater, Hammel discovered that Uranus' nine main rings comprise a single layer of particles, something not found in other rings. With the super-sharp optics system used at the W. M. Keck Observatory, Drs. de Pater and Hammel found an 11th ring around Uranus, a narrow sheet of rocky debris. The ring, the innermost of its siblings, is about 3,500 kilometers (2,200 mi) wide and centered about 39,600 kilometers (24,600 mi) from the planet's core. The ring was visible because its edge-on position to the sun and Earth in 2007 reflected more light than the more typical face-on view. Hammel reported clocking the fastest winds ever recorded on Uranus, roaring along between 107 and 111 meters per second (240 and 260 miles per hour); the winds were measured in October 2003 on the northernmost parts of the planet visible at that time. In addition to her research on the planet Uranus, Hammel was also on the team that first spotted Neptune's Great Dark Spot, a raging storm as big as Earth, and she led the Hubble Space Telescope team that documented the Great Dark Spot's disappearance after just a few years. Hammel's planetary research has demonstrated that both Uranus and Neptune are dynamic worlds.

Hammel described her own recent research by saying that "one thing that we all care about is the weather, and we care about the weather on the Earth the most. But what makes weather is gases and clouds, and the reason the weather on the Earth is hard to predict is because we have oceans and continents that interact with our atmosphere. That makes it very hard to predict the weather, as we all know. But if you take a planet like Jupiter or Neptune you don't have continents and you don't have oceans. All you have is gas, all you have is atmosphere, and therefore it's a lot easier to model the weather on those planets. But it's the same physical process, it's the same kind of thing happening, whether it happens on the Earth or whether it happens on Neptune. Therefore by studying weather on Neptune we learn about weather in general, and that helps us understand the weather on Earth better".