Uranus smells like rotten eggs
The planet’s cloud tops contain hydrogen sulfide, the compound that gives bad eggs their stink

TAKE A WHIFF Uranus is a lovely robin’s egg blue in this image taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew past in 1986. New measurements of the planet’s chemistry suggests it may smell like eggs, too — that is, really rotten eggs.
JPL/NASA
This article is only available to Science News subscribers.
Subscribers, enter your e-mail address to access our archives.
