Uranus and Neptune May Have Taken Different Paths to Becoming Ice Giants - Sci.News

Despite the iconic documentary, Uranus and Neptune are arguably the real “blue planets” in our solar system. And their visual similarities in part convinced astronomers that they were evolutionary and chemical twins—but looks can deceive, as a new study has found. In short, the similarities we observe today between Uranus and Neptune may be a coincidence, according to research published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Studying recent measurements of carbon monoxide revealed that Neptune’s deep atmosphere has more oxygen than that of Uranus. Using this information, the team ran models to track regions of the protoplanetary disk—a rotating “platter” of gas and dust that forms planets—that birthed Uranus and Neptune. Surprisingly, the analysis strongly suggested that Uranus and Neptune weren’t from the same section of the protoplanetary disk, which would also give them different chemical origins. “Uranus and Neptune may resemble twins today, but their chemistry is telling us that they are more like cousins with very different histories,” Olivier Mousis, the study’s co-author and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.

This week, MBARI President and CEO Antje Boetius participated in Mission Neptune’s Polar Oceans Challenge during New York Climate Week, seeking to raise awareness about the urgent need for sustained research in polar regions. Polar environments are integral to the health of our planet and host unique communities of life, but are experiencing dramatic changes due to the rapid warming of Earth, especially in the Arctic and increasingly in Antarctica. MBARI and our peers in the global scientific community are working to answer fundamental questions about polar ecosystems to inform about the future of the Arctic and Antarctic. International scientific collaboration—including joint missions aboard icebreaker ships, networked deployment of robotic floats through the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) program, buoys, and sailing and drift studies—is essential to observe ice loss, ocean change, and the fate of endemic polar life.

Diamond is famous for its beauty, but its value extends far beyond jewelry. This exceptionally hard form of carbon is used to make the tiny capsules that hold fuel in inertial confinement fusion experiments. Scientists also think diamonds may form and fall like rain far beneath the surfaces of ice giant planets such as Neptune and Uranus. In both environments, diamond is subjected to immense pressure. Yet researchers have struggled for years to determine exactly how the material responds under such extreme conditions because laboratory measurements and computer simulations have produced conflicting results.