Mapping the interior of the ice giants is difficult, to say the least. Not only are they far away and therefore harder to observe, but their constant ice cover makes it extremely hard to detect what ...

Neptune moons clay minerals: JWST spectroscopy has detected magnesium-rich clay on Neptune's inner moons Larissa and Galatea — minerals that form only inside large, water-bearing worlds. Published ...

Astronomers have long called Uranus and Neptune the "ice giants" because models suggested that these outer planets' interiors are largely made of mixtures of water, ammonia and other ices — compounds ...

The deep interior of Neptune, Uranus and Earth may contain some solid ice. Through first-principle molecular dynamics simulations, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, together with ...

When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune 40 years ago, astronomers were surprised that it detected no global dipole magnetic fields, like Earth's. The explanation: the ice giants are layered and ...

(Phys.org) —While everyone is familiar with water in the liquid, ice, and gas phases, water can also exist in many other phases over a vast range of temperature and pressure conditions. One lesser ...

Uranus and Neptune may not be classic ice giants. New research challenges long standing views of their internal composition. The scientists observed that these distant planets could be far rockier ...

USPEX Helps to Solve Long-Standing Mystery of Planet Neptune’s Excessive Heat Newswise — Stony Brook University Professor of Geosciences and Physics, Artem Oganov, along with several colleagues, ...

What impact do thick clouds have on the interiors of sub-Neptunes? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the ...

The surfaces of two of Neptune's small inner moons are coated in clay minerals — and clay minerals cannot form there. That contradiction, confirmed by new spectroscopic data from NASA's James Webb ...