Exciting and Unexpected Discoveries From Uranus and Its Moons

so yeah today we're going to be talking about Uranus Olivia jokes in the comments below okay yeah technically I've always been pronouncing it as Uranus and that's the more proper way of saying it and essentially what we're going to be discussing are some of the new discoveries and some of the more unusual discoveries from the mysterious seventh planet the planet that we actually know very little

about and the planet whose moons are even more mysterious for reasons we're going to discuss today but because of the unique position Uranus currently has across the solar system it presents the scientists with a unique opportunity to study exactly what happens inside this planet which led to several major discoveries in just the last few months hello wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to

discuss some of the recent discoveries coming from various telescopes including the genes of stress telescope in regards to Uranus and its 27 moons although we're mostly going to focus on five moons and some of the more unusual discoveries that sort of surprised the sciences and I think here it's important to start with some of the most recent observations from the James webspace telescope the observations that

only lasted for approximately 12 minutes and in those incredible 12 minutes this is what he was able to see an incredibly beautiful composition of Uranus and its major moons but what's really intriguing in this image is of course how extremely bright the Rings appear in this image compared to anything else we've ever seen on top of several bright features that are now visible inside the atmosphere

as well just to give you a comparison here is the only image we previously had of this planet from the Voyager probe which basically make it look completely plain and somewhat boring although even here if you look at the planet in different light for example infrared light you're able to see something else happening along the polar regions but prior to this a lot of previous observations

at the center of the Polar cap and that's because the Uranus like planet earth has its own Seasons but the seasons here usually last for a very long time 42 years of sunlight followed by 42 years of Darkness because the planet also spins on its side and so here as the Northern Hemisphere becomes exposed to the sunlight the polar regions along the hemispheres also change color

and this polar cap that's unique to Uranus will most likely vanish in the next couple of decades but what's intriguing in this image is of course that you can also see individual clouds only visible in infrared wavelengths and in this case the scientists are almost certain that this is related to extremely powerful storm activity that's obviously also visible on other planets as well but unlike Earth

where this is all water vapor on Uranus it's water methane and ammonia and we obviously also see 11 out of 13 known rings with a lot of them appearing brighter than anything else before and there is something really intriguing to discover about the ring sphere recently now we're going to discuss in a couple of minutes but just by itself this image is already quite incredible but

more recently the scientists use a microwave telescope specifically the very large array from New Mexico to try to look into this polar region and discover what's inside the storm confirming that this is actually a very powerful event as visible in these images here you can see it in three different frequencies of microwave wavelings and what this essentially proves is the fact that pretty much 7 out

of 8 planets in the solar system all contain storms and not just any storms very powerful Cyclones and anticyclones with overall similar physics but usually extremely different in size and more importantly different in composition here's what we have on Earth here is something we have on Mars and in this case this is mostly dust Jupiter of obviously has a bunch including the famous Great Red Spot

and something similar has also been found on Neptune and Saturn as well with Venus having its own versions of four vortices as well the only planet that we haven't found anything on just yet is mercury probably because it has no atmosphere but for all we know it has its own version of these Cyclones that we just haven't found yet but unlike Earth where all of this

is formed over water and relies on very specific heat exchange a lot of these other vortices around other planets seem to essentially form over a fixed location and potentially represent extremely massive three-dimensional structures we basically only see the surface with these discoveries also implying that this seems to be slightly warmer and drier air which is what we expect a cyclone to have and so even though

we call these planets ice giants the reality is that they are extremely active and possess a lot of internal activity that we just cannot observe very easily but a lot of discoveries in the last few months were also in regards to the moons and the Rings or technically the connection of the Rings to the moons with the first major Discovery come in in regards to the

five main moons of Uranus Ariel umbrella Titania Oberon and Miranda you can see that there are four very large moons and we run this a bit on a smaller side now all of this was mostly based on modeling and trying to figure out exactly what's on the surface and inside these moons but overall the scientists discovered that these moons seem to be quite insulated when a

relatively thick surface that in theory should allow them to sustain liquid oceans inside and although maybe not as big and as profound as oceans on objects like Europa that you see right here the moon of Jupiter it's quite likely that these moons would contain heat sources on the inside to maintain warm environments as well as even materials like ammonia which can act as antifreeze with recent

evidence that you can find right here even suggests in some kind of a flow that happened relatively recently on the moon aerial possibly from some kind of a subsurface ice volcano and the study suggests that some of these oceans might even be warm enough to sustain habitability for potential primitive life in other words we have another planetary system in the solar system that contains moons with

oceans inside and even a chance for some kind of a subsurface life which is of course an excellent opportunity for someone to finally start planning admission to this unusual Faraway Planet except for the Voyager 2 probe nobody has ever visited Uranus or Neptune and the potential Mission here has been actually in planning for decades now nothing so far has happened but then we have some really

intriguing discoveries from the strangest moon in the solar system Miranda the smallest of the big moons around Uranus and just looking at the picture of this Moon you can kind of explain why we call it the strangest moon or sometimes the ugliest Moon because it has this unusual very difficult to explain features which it really shouldn't have its surface is covered in a lot of very

unusual stuff and it's also home to the largest 20 kilometer High Cliff known as Verona Rubes apparently if you jump from this it will take you nearly 15 minutes to reach the bottom and so overall Miranda has one of the most extreme surfaces in the solar system containing a lot of unusual scratches a lot of unusual chasms weird valleys and a lot of features that are

just very difficult to explain it's also about half ice half silicate Rock so even its composition is a little bit strange and because this moon is so small and overall is believed to be relatively cold on the inside it's impossible to explain any of this using some kind of a geologic activity such as volcanoes or things like plate tectonics and so the question has always been

what happened here why is it like this it should not have enough heat and enough energy on the inside to produce any of these geological features and while there's always has been three main explanations some kind of an impact some kind of a volcanic or plume deposit similar to the ones we observe on iO or maybe this was from the rings of Uranus and so one

of the recent studies wanted to investigate exactly how possibly all this formed specifically looking at the relatively thick layer of ragolith and a number of different craters located on the surface that could actually help the scientists determine how thick the surface is and what the scientists realized in this case is that well it seems that due to the location around Neptune and due to the composition

on the surface compared to the rings around Saturn is actually a very high correlation between the two or basically allurdus might have come from ancient Uranus rings that over time deposited all the material on a Surface as this moon sometimes back in the past moved across the Rings or very close to them capturing the material in the process which of course implies several things first of

all that this moon was much smaller and very likely contain different materials in the past but second of all the rings around Uranus must have been massive before massive enough to enlarge the moon and create all these unusual features and because both Miranda and the Rings also seem to possess slightly similar blue color on top of a lot of other features at the moment the scientists

believe that this is maybe the best possible explanation this Moon basically sucked up a lot of ring material in the process forming these unusual features we see on the surface which by itself already warrants a potential mission to this Moon as it's going to help us learn so much about Uranus and the entire solar system but I guess the obvious more intriguing question in this case

being Saturn can something like this also happen around Saturn in the future will one of the moons absorb some of the Rings and possess these features kind of similar to Miranda we're not going to be able to answer these questions just yet but there is a video relatively recent video about Saturn's rings and new discoveries from these rings as well that you can find any description

although when it comes to Uranus and its moons at least for now that's pretty much all we know and that's what the scientists have recently discovered once we'll learn something else I'll make sure to follow this up with the next video Until then thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has learned about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and

if you support this channel on patreon by Julian Channel membership or by buying a wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description today I want to fall asleep tomorrow and as always bye [Music] [Music] thank you foreign foreign