Methane Ice on Uranus and Neptune Is Thought To Be “Frozen Water”: Research

A significant discovery about the two major planets of the solar system, Uranus and Neptune, was made in 1980 by NASA’s Voyager 2 probe. Scientists at the time believed that there was a significant quantity of ice frozen on the two planets based on data from Voyager. Ice was intended to be frozen water, as is often the case. However, recent research indicates that these planets could possibly have significant methane ice deposits.

There are claims that this finding holds the key to unlocking the mystery of how both planets arose. The lack of information and their distance from Earth have made Uranus and Neptune a mystery. Based on these discoveries, astronomers have created models that propose the planets have a rocky core with a water component that makes them “ice giants,” a thin envelope of hydrogen and helium, and a superionic layer that is buried and contains water and ammonia.

The recent analysis casts doubt on this idea by taking Neptune’s and Uranus’ development into account. According to the findings, these planets may have ingested planetesimals, or things like modern comets, during their formation from the primordial dust cloud around the young Sun.

These tiny stars are believed to be mostly composed of carbon, in contrast to the materials implied by current models, which are assumed to be dominated by water. Uri Malamud, the study’s principal author and a planetary scientist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, asks, “How can we explain the formation of an icy giant using building blocks lacking in ice?”

In order to address this discrepancy, the scientists created a number of models of the interior compositions of Uranus and Neptune, looking at elements like iron, water, and methane. They found that the models that best matched the reported properties of the planets included methane, either as solid masses or under extreme pressure in a semi-liquid condition. Methane may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of these ice giants’ origins. According to scientific theory, methane ice originated from a chemical reaction between hydrogen in developing planets and carbon, which would have developed more abundantly on developing planets. These findings may be verified by expeditions that are dispatched to these planets in the future.