Uranus Smells Terrible. There, We Said it

Let’s stop pretending, shall we? Because really, we’re not fooling anyone. Uranus is funny. It was funny when you were twelve, and it’s funny now. It was certainly funny when I was a boy and went to a space-themed summer camp where all the bunks were named after planets and Uranus happened to be where we stored the sports equipment, meaning that every now and then a counselor would say, “Somebody put those bats in Uranus,” and then would have to walk over and put them there himself because we were too busy falling over one another laughing. And it was absolutely funny in 1986 when the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by the planet and headlines around the country said, “Probe Approaches Uranus.” And now it’s funny again, with the news that Uranus, yes, smells terrible. It couldn’t be Mars. Nope. Couldn’t be Venus. Had to be Uranus. The finding comes courtesy of a study in Nature Astronomy, revealing that the cloud tops of Uranus are made principally of hydrogen sulfide, the gas that is principally responsible for the foul smell of rotten eggs and, yes, human flatulence. The Internet has done what the Internet always does in these situations, which is to resist the obvious jokes and focus soberly on the science. Kidding! “Somebody light a match,” wrote the Huffington Post. “Uranus stinks,” offered The Washington Post. And @twitmericks provided perhaps Twitter’s best contribution to the discussi...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime space Source Type: news