Bestätigt: Uranus ist wirklich heißer als es ein Recht hat zu sein

I’ve been telling women that for years but they don’t listen to me!

Probably left over heat from whatever collision that tipped its axis so far off. 

Thanks, that’s the post title I’ve not expected today, but sure glad to see.

I’ve seen too many documentaries with British narrators to immediately appreciate this title. Most of which were about Greek mythology rather than the planets, though.

Let’s talk about why this is a potentially really interesting result. Our understanding of how the solar system formed and evolved is based on the information the planets in their current state can tell us.

One of the most interesting aspects of Uranus is that it was considered to be incredibly cool compared to other planets, to the point that the atmosphere seemed to only be heated by sunlight. That’s challenging, how does a planet lose all that heat. It is even more challenging because Neptune seems to have a really large amount of heat within it – how are too such similar planets apparently so different.

There has been a lot of discussion within the planetary community that suggests that maybe Uranus isn’t as unheated as we once thought, that estimates of Neptune heating are too high. This result seems to suggest that those thoughts are not misplaced.

So – Uranus seems to have lost energy (perhaps from the tilt event that left it on its side), but not as dramatically as past estimates suggested. THat helps *a lot* in understanding the evolution, since it no longer needs to lose as dramatic an amount.

Please sign me up for the mission to Uranus, I want to be all up in that.