The Solar System - Outer Planets, Gas Giants
And then into the darkness of space. That's where the gas giants live. These are four more planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Jupiter and Saturn are composed of hydrogen and helium. Neptune and Uranus, however, are made of ice. These two planets, Neptune and Uranus, are also considered ice giants.
#solarsystem #gasgiants #icegiants #distantplanets #space #uranus #neptune #saturn #jupiter #cold #moons #storms #ice #vortex
Inside the ice giants, a layer exists of familiar rains and snows...and often at a pressure range that wouldn't require spacesuits! Could these planets harbor environments that are shockingly Earth-like?
More thoughts at my #blog: https://adamasnemesis.com/2025/12/14/another-earth-in-the-depths-of-neptune/
This post's featured image is Neptune and Triton seen on departure by Voyager 2.
#worldbuilding #science #astronomy #habitability #planetaryhabitability #icegiants #planetaryscience #gasgiants #atmospheres #oxygen
Fresh JWST view of Uranus taken Oct 6 2025 with NIRCam.
Full size & more info: https://flic.kr/p/2rByidu
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Andrea Luck CC BY
Proposal PI: Varun Bajaj
Proposal ID: 8975
Filters: F150W2-F162M, F410M
#Uranus #JWST #Space #Astronomy #Solarocks #IceGiants #Astrodon
A neat story by @DrCarpineti: "'This is the quadfecta, completing the set of observing auroral emissions from all of the four giant planets in the infrared. We knew it should be there since Neptune has all the ingredients you need to create aurorae, but we were never able to detect it using telescopes on the ground.'"
#PlanetaryScience #Neptune #GiantPlanets #IceGiants #SolarSystem
Interesting idea, and timely with recent Uranus probe discussions.
Preprint reports that regular cadence radio range data measurements to an Ice Giants probe during interplanetary travel, could yield some interesting gravitational wave (micro-Hz regime) science!
With the recent announcement by NASA's \textit{Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032}, a priority flagship mission to the planet Uranus is anticipated. Here, we explore the prospects of using the mission's radio Doppler tracking equipment to detect gravitational waves (GWs) and other analogous signals related to dark matter (DM) over the duration of its interplanetary cruise. We develop a methodology to stack tracking data and account for time varying detector geometry, thereby constructing the sensitivity of the mission to GWs over the wide frequency range of $3\times 10^{-9}$ Hz to $10^{-4}$ Hz. We find that the mission has the potential to fill the gap between pulsar timing and space-based-interferometry GW observatories. If improvements in reducing \textit{Cassini} era noise by a factor of $\sim$10 are implemented, we forecast the detection of $\mathcal{\mathcal{O}}(\rm{few})$ individual massive black hole binaries using two independent population models. Additionally, we determine the mission's sensitivity to both astrophysical and primordial stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds, as well as its capacity to test, or even confirm via detection, ultralight DM models. In all these cases, the tracking of the spacecraft over its interplanetary cruise would enable coverage of unexplored regions of parameter space, where signals from new phenomena in our Universe may be lurking.
2/2
To celebrate this Cloudy Ice Giant, I created a quick animation using the last three images of Uranus taken by ESA/NASA #JWST Space Telescope.
Full size images and more info here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAgNJy
The images in the animation were taken during a period of 1 year:
1) 2023/02/06 https://flic.kr/p/2oUiuJJ
2) 2023/09/04 https://flic.kr/p/2pnVhGY
3) 2024/02/06 https://flic.kr/p/2pwQ1en
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/AndreaLuck CC BY
Explore this photo album by Andrea Luck on Flickr!
A new image of #Uranus just dropped on https://mast.stsci.edu !!!
Full size image & More info: https://flic.kr/p/2pwQ1en
NASA/ESA JWST Webb Space Telescope
Title: Uranus high spatial resolution global map from NIRCam
Time: 2024-02-06
Filters: F182M, F410M, F210M, F480M
Proposal PI: Naomi Rowe-Gurney
Proposal ID 2768
Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/AndreaLuck
#Space #Uranus #Astronomy #IceGiants #Space #Solarocks
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