PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2021-06-14 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Does Uranus Smell Like Farts? (de)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On June 14, 2021, after a non-sequitur tweet about the lengths of planetary orbits by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk caused the name Uranus to start trending on social media, the UberFacts Twitter account posted a message that many people assumed was a somewhat childish joke at the expense of the planet's name (Uranus sounds like your anus). The Twitter account claimed that Uranus smells like farts: Surprisingly, this is not a joke. This funny fact first surfaced in 2018 after a study about the gas giant was published in Nature Astronomy. The lead author of the study, Patrick Irwin, a Professor of Planetary Physics at Oxford University, and his colleagues studied Uranus' atmosphere with the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and its Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer (NIFS), and found the signature of hydrogen sulfide in the planet's cloud deck. If you've ever been around this colorless gas, you probably know that it smells like rotten eggs or flatulence. That means that if a human ever had a chance to smell Uranus, they'd probably remark that it smelled like farts. Space.com reported: A press release from the Gemini Observatory explains the importance of this discovery. And no, it's not so future astronauts can avoid offensive planetary smells: While this discovery is important in terms of understanding the formation of the planets, it's the smell of Uranus that proved to be the study's most popular point. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, humans will probably never be able to take in a whiff of Uranus' smelly, fart-filled atmosphere. Irwin said that if a human ever did find themselves on Uranus, they would probably die of suffocation, or from the planet's negative 400 degree Fahrenheit atmosphere, before they ever got a chance to smell the planet: Astronomer Phil Plait also noted that Uranus probably only smells like farts a little because the hydrogen sulfide in the planet's clouds is frozen. In short, it would be more accurate (but less funny), to say that hydrogen sulfide, a gas that smells like rotten eggs, has been found in Uranus' atmosphere. While there is probably a fart-like smell to the planet, it's not clear how prevalent this odor would be, and humans will probably never get a chance to actually smell it. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url