Well, well, well, it looks like scientists have finally figured out who’s been stinking up space. Who’s been cutting a celestial stinker. Who’s been ripping astronomical ass. Who’s been breaking wind at 560 MPH. Yes, it’s true—Uranus really does smell like farts after all.
This week, scientists have verfied that we’ve been joking about our goofiest-named planet correctly all along. Using data from Hawaii’s Gemini North telescope, researchers at the University of Oxford have found that most of the planet’s upper atmosphere is composed of hydrogen sulfide—the same stuff that causes the sickening odor when eggs rot or people rip ass.
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“If an unfortunate human were ever to descend through Uranus’s clouds, they would be met with very unpleasant and odiferous conditions,” Patrick Irwin, one of the study’s authors, said in a news release.
Said unfortunate human would suffer a worse fate then a planetary dutch oven, though, since Uranus is cold as fuck. “Suffocation and exposure in the -200 degrees Celsius atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, helium, and methane would take its toll long before the smell,” Irwin goes on.
The fact that Uranus smells like butt thunder was originally hypothesized by basically every annoying elementary school kid ever and then backed up by Gizmodo last year, but this new research seems to have finally proven it, once and for all.
Although, Uranus is far from the only planet in our solar system that reeks. Venus also likely has a definitively flatulent smell, NASA says, and Mars has a vague shit fume scent, too, which, strangely, has yet to serve as a plot point in any of the many, many, many movies about the Red Planet. For the record, our moon smells like old gunpowder, at least according to the astronauts who walked on it. Things aren’t all that bad here on Earth, though—apparently all we have to worry about is the periodic stench of poop trains.
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