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In science news that will absolutely delight 6th graders and immature adults everywhere, scientists have confirmed that Uranus stinks. For the unfortunately named planet that has been the butt of a gazillion jokes it only gets worse. Scientists have confirmed that Uranus smells like farts because of the gases that surround it. Cue the fart puns.
Scientists cracked the case of the smelly Uranus by analyzing data from the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. What they discovered was clouds of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia. Hydrogen sulfide smells like rotten eggs or farts and Uranus has clouds of this odor encompassing it. “We have definitely detected the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas above the main cloud deck, and this is the smoking gun that the main cloud deck is mostly made by hydrogen sulfide ice,” said lead author Professor Patrick Irwin, from the University of Oxford.
While the fart smell is silent, the other elements of Uranus are deadly. “Suffocation and exposure in the -200 degrees Celsius atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, helium, and methane would take its toll long before the smell,” Irwin said.
But it isn’t all fart jokes, this discovery could help explain the formation of the solar system. “It adds another piece of information about the planets and how they form,” Irwin said. “Uranus and Neptune formed in a colder part of the solar nebula, the early stage of our solar system when it was just our young sun and lots of dust, than Jupiter and Saturn.” This means that hydrogen sulfide is less easily absorbed by the giant planets including Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.
“This is evidence of a big shakeup early on in the solar system’s formation,” said Glenn Orton, a co-author of the new study and a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “There was definitely a migration taking place.”
Uranus, the ice giant planet and the seventh planet from the sun, was first thought to have hydrogen sulfide after the Voyager 2 probe flew by the blue-green planet in 1986. But the latest data confirms the stinky gas clouds. The discovery was posted in the journal Nature Astronomy this week, which defies all “whoever smelt it, dealt it” logic.