2024-04-17 21:06:02
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For many years, scientists believed that Uranus was primarily a frozen world, an “ice giant” composed of helium and hydrogen with a little methane.
However, recent research has turned this assumption upside down, as scientists have revealed that Uranus is much more gaseous than we thought, and that a large portion of its core is not composed of ice, but of a surprisingly soft, stable form of methane.
Scientists from the Israel Institute of Technology and the University of California Santa Cruz found that despite findings that Uranus is composed entirely of ice, approximately 10% of it is actually methane.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, said that classifying Uranus as an “ice giant” may no longer be accurate and that massive amounts of methane could have helped form the planet.
Much is still unknown about Uranus because it is located 1.9 billion miles from Earth, but because the solar system is constantly moving, the distance changes daily and can reach two billion miles.
Only one spacecraft in history, Voyager 2, has passed by the planet in the 1980s, leaving scientists believing that the planet consists entirely of ice.
To get a better understanding, scientists developed hundreds of thousands of models of the interior of Uranus and tried to determine which model most closely resembled the ice giant’s mass and radius.
Each model had different levels of methane, helium and hydrogen, but scientists found that the models with the most gaseous elements most closely resembled Uranus.
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