Uranus smells like rotten eggs

rietrot said:
o so we when to Uranus and tested some samples from its atmosphere. I had no idea. When did this happen?
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They can use the wavelengths of the reflection and refraction of light to determine the composition of atmospheres accurately, do to experiments on earth on how those elements work...
 
rietrot said:
They were in sealed suits. They wouldn't have been able to smell when visiting the moon.
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I didn't mean they went and smelt it on the lunar surface, and they weren't in their full on sealed suits in the lunar lander and the pod home. If moon dust is anything like beach sand, it got everywhere.
 
Large parts of this thread remind me of why I, very early on, learnt to pronounce it with the accent on the first syllable.
 
rietrot said:
Im still very sceptical about how they predict the makeup of other planets, especially the stuff that you can't see.
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What parts are you skeptical about?
The evidence for hydrogen sulfide eluded scientists during decades of ground observations and even a 1986 flyby of the unmanned Voyager 2 deep space probe. But recently an international team that included Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford managed to find the elusive molecule in the absorption spectra of the Uranian atmosphere collected by Gemini North from reflected sunlight. Since Uranus and Neptune are very similar in other respects, the scientists conclude that hydrogen sulfide should be present in the cloud tops of Neptune as well.
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Spectroscopy is about as rock solid a theory as you get.

https://newatlas.com/uranus-smell-rotten-eggs/54331/

Absorption spectroscopy refers to spectroscopic techniques that measure the absorption of radiation, as a function of frequency or wavelength, due to its interaction with a sample. The sample absorbs energy, i.e., photons, from the radiating field. The intensity of the absorption varies as a function of frequency, and this variation is the absorption spectrum. Absorption spectroscopy is performed across the electromagnetic spectrum.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_spectroscopy
400px-Sodium_in_atmosphere_of_exoplanet_HD_209458.jpg

You can easily test this stuff in the lab.
 
rietrot said:
Yes I also don't believe them blindly on that.
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Good.

Therefore you can do the observations yourself.
1) You need a fairly decent telescope, and a mount that would allow you to take an 1h long photo.
2) You need a fairly decent digital camera.
3) You need a spectrograph.

http://astrosurf.com/thizy/lhires3/index-en.html

If you set it up like this:
photo1.jpg

You can take a picture of a star that looks like this:
spectre.jpg

Those little lines indicate the different elements in the star. Once you do some image processing, you can determine the composition of the gasses in the image.
 
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