{"id":12817,"date":"2025-07-15T23:37:03","date_gmt":"2025-07-15T23:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/12817\/"},"modified":"2025-07-15T23:37:03","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T23:37:03","slug":"uranus-leaks-more-heat-than-we-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/12817\/","title":{"rendered":"Uranus Leaks More Heat Than We Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Voyager 2 <\/a>flew past Uranus in 1986, the spacecraft detected a surprisingly low level of internal heat from the planet. Since then, scientists believed Uranus to be the odd one out in our solar system\u2019s family of giant planets\u2014the others being Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune\u2014who all tend to emit more heat than they absorb from sunlight.<\/p>\n

Now, a new study suggests that scientists may have had the wrong idea<\/a> about Voyager 2\u2019s data: Uranus does have an internal heat source similar to its planetary siblings. For the study, published Monday in Geophysical Research Letters<\/a>, researchers analyzed decades of archival data available on the ice giant, finding that Uranus emits 12.5% more internal heat than it absorbs from the Sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s still considerably less heat than the other three giant planets, which emit more than 100% of the solar energy they receive. Nevertheless, the study demonstrates that Uranus doesn\u2019t stray too far from scientists\u2019 general understanding of how giant planets form and evolve.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed data on Uranus\u2019s global energy balance across one full orbit of the Sun, which takes 84 years. The team took this observational data and combined it with computational models, finding big seasonal swings driven by the planet\u2019s wild changes in sunlight exposure. The new findings are consistent with an earlier paper about Uranus\u2019s energy balance, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society<\/a> in May.<\/p>\n

That said, neither study offers a clear answer as to why Uranus\u2019s internal heat is much lower than the other gas and ice giants. Uranus may have had a \u201cdifferent interior structure or evolutionary history compared to the other giant planets,\u201d the researchers noted in a statement<\/a>. The study also found that Uranus\u2019s energy levels change according to its 20-year-long seasons. These fluctuations, along with the planet\u2019s heat budget, \u201cprovide observational constraints that can be used to develop theories of planetary formation for giant planets,\u201d the study states.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Thus, the paper both answers and raises questions about Uranus, which the researchers cite as a good reason for future NASA missions to investigate the icy planet further.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBy uncovering how Uranus stores and loses heat, we gain valuable insights into the fundamental processes that shape planetary atmospheres, weather systems, and climate systems,\u201d said Liming Li, study co-author and physicist at the University of Houston, in the release. \u201cThese findings help broaden our perspective on Earth\u2019s atmospheric system and the challenges of climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, the spacecraft detected a surprisingly low level of internal heat…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[718,79,780,12546,12547],"class_list":["post-12817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-nasa","tag-science","tag-solar-system","tag-uranus","tag-voyager-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}