While Uranus — with its bluish-green tint — may look inviting from afar, any visitors to the seventh planet from the sun will quickly find out, it’s quite the stinker.
In a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, researchers from the California Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford and the University of Leicester confirmed that the planet’s atmosphere is filled with hydrogen sulfide. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same smelly chemical compound found in rotten eggs and, well, bad flatulence.
“If an unfortunate human were ever to descend through Uranus’s clouds,” lead author Patrick Irwin of the University of Oxford explains in a release, “they would be met with very unpleasant and odiferous conditions.”
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Scientists have long speculated that Uranus was foul-smelling, according to Science News magazine, but they weren’t able to confirm it until they looked at the planet’s infrared light using the Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer of the Gemini North telescope.
“This work is a strikingly innovative use of an instrument originally designed to study the explosive environments around huge black holes at the centers of distant galaxies,” said Chris Davis of the United State’s National Science Foundation. “To use NIFS to solve a longstanding mystery in our own Solar System is a powerful extension of its use.”
Using the sophisticated telescope — found atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano — scientists observed the “noxious gas” swirling in the planet’s clouds.
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“At the risk of schoolboy sniggers, if you were there, flying through the clouds of Uranus, yes, you’d get this pungent, rather disastrous smell,” planetary scientist Leigh Fletcher told Science News.
Yet, when we’re finally able to cruise through the solar system aboard one of Elon Musk’s Space X vehicles many years into the future, those adventurous enough to want to get a whiff of Uranus will be smart to stay away from the planet. Turns out, its atmosphere may be silent, but deadly.
“Suffocation and exposure in the negative 200 degrees Celsius atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, helium, and methane would take its toll long before the smell,” Irwin said.
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