Uranus smells like rotten eggs

Binary_Bark

Forging
Joined
Feb 24, 2016
Messages
41,631
Reaction score
23,527
Location
Midgard
If you could sniff a planet, what would it smell like? According to an international team of scientists working with the 8-meter Gemini North infrared telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, if you could get a whiff of the planet Uranus, it would have the pungent odor of rotten eggs. The icy planet is on the nose due to the presence of the noxious gas hydrogen sulfide, and the discovery could provide clues about the formation of the outer planets of our Solar System.

A glance at a chart of the Solar System shows that it's anything but homogenous. The inner system is made up of Earthlike rocky planets while the outer system is dominated by the gas giants. But it isn't as simple as that. For decades, scientists have suspected that the gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, might not be one group but two, with Jupiter and Saturn having developed in a different way to that of Uranus and Neptune.

The key to this is the composition of the upper atmosphere. According to Dr Leigh Fletcher, a member of the research team from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy, the different histories of the gas giants is reflected by the fact that the upper layers of Jupiter and Saturn are filled with ammonia, but that isn't the case with Uranus and Neptune, where it's been long suspected that hydrogen sulfide, the chemical that gives rotten eggs their stink, is present.

More AT: https://newatlas.com/uranus-smell-rotten-eggs/54331/
 
Im still very sceptical about how they predict the makeup of other planets, especially the stuff that you can't see.
 
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X