Scientists have found methane deep inside Uranus, revealing the blue planet has more gases than previously thought.
Early Uranus experiments found the planet to be composed primarily of helium and hydrogen with a touch of methane, but a new study says it greatly exceeds previous expectations.
The strange thing about methane, however, is that it is not in gas form, but frozen or “soft,” like a 7-eleven Slurpee, and is lodged in the core of Uranus.
Researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology and the University of California, Santa Cruz revealed that despite findings that Uranus is composed entirely of ice, about 10 percent is actually methane.
Researchers have discovered that Uranus is made of more gas than previously believed and want to understand why it is made of ice if there is a large amount of methane in its core.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, says that the classification of Uranus as an “ice giant” may no longer be accurate and that large amounts of methane could have helped the planet’s formation.
Much is still unknown about Uranus because it is 1.9 billion miles from Earth, but because the solar system is constantly moving, the distance changes daily, reaching a distance of 2 billion miles.
It has only had one spacecraft flyby in history, Voyager 2, in the 1980s, which left scientists believing the planet was composed entirely of ice.
To better understand it, researchers developed hundreds of thousands of models of Uranus’s interior and tried to determine which model most closely matched the ice giant’s mass and radius.
Each model had different levels of methane, helium and hydrogen, but the researchers found that the models with more gaseous elements looked more like Uranus.
Now they seek to better understand why the planet is made of ice if a large surplus of gas is retained within Uranus.
These findings could shed light on the distant planet and its nearby giants, including Neptune, to verify how they formed and better explain what elements they are made of.