Science has confirmed that Uranus stinks
Uranus smells foul and there’s scientific proof.
Researchers confirmed this week that the seventh planet from the sun has an upper atmosphere full of one of the most malodorous chemicals known to humans, hydrogen sulphide, according to a study published by Nature Astronomy. The gas is what gives rotten eggs — and human flatulence — their distinctive and unpleasant smell.
“If an unfortunate human were ever to descend through Uranus’s clouds, they would be met with very unpleasant and odoriferous conditions,” Patrick Irwin, a physicist at the University of Oxford, who led the study, said in a statement.
Scientists discovered evidence of “the noxious gas swirling high in the giant planet’s cloud tops,” after observing how sunlight bounced off Uranus’ atmosphere, says a news release from the Gemini Observatory, a high-power telescope located on top of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano.
The findings come after decades of observations of the blue-green giant, the release said. Scientists long inferred hydrogen sulphide existed in its atmosphere, but never “conclu- sively detected” the gas, according to Science News.
Using an eight-metre Gemini North telescope, the team studied the reflected sunlight in infrared and determined what types of molecules made up the planet’s atmosphere, the release said.
Glenn Orton, a co-author of the new study and a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Business Insider the new research points to “evidence of a big shakeup early on in the solar system’s formation.”