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An ice giant is a giant planet composed mainly of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur. There are two ice giants in the Solar System : Uranus and Neptune .
Although there are many icy objects in the Solar System, none of them qualify as planets under the IAU definition of planet.However, most planetary-mass moons are ice-rock (e.g. Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus, Titan, and Triton) or even primarily ice (e.g. Mimas, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Iapetus) and so qualify as ice planets under geophysical definitions of the term.
Giant planets are sometimes known as gas giants, but many astronomers now apply the term only to Jupiter and Saturn, classifying Uranus and Neptune, which have different compositions, as ice giants. Both names are potentially misleading; the Solar System's giant planets all consist primarily of fluids above their critical points, where distinct gas
It is a gaseous cyan-coloured ice giant. Most of the planet is made of water, ammonia, and methane in a supercritical phase of matter, which astronomy calls "ice" or volatiles. The planet's atmosphere has a complex layered cloud structure and has the lowest minimum temperature (49 K (−224 °C; −371 °F)) of all the Solar System's
A lone spacecraft's visit to Uranus may have left us with the complete wrong impression of the ice giant for nearly 40 years.. The strange, sideways-rotating planet – the third largest in our ...
Giant planet: A massive planet. They are most commonly composed primarily of 'gas' (hydrogen and helium) or 'ices' (volatiles such as water, methane, and ammonia), but may also be composed primarily of rock, which would make one a Mega Earth. [1] Regardless of their bulk compositions, giant planets normally have thick atmospheres of hydrogen ...
The researchers used plastic to recreate precipitation believed to form deep inside ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune. Diamonds rain from the sky on billions of planets, new research shows Skip ...
For the giant planets, the "radius" is defined as the distance from the center at which the atmosphere reaches 1 bar of atmospheric pressure. [ 11 ] Because Sedna and 2002 MS 4 have no known moons, directly determining their mass is impossible without sending a probe (estimated to be from 1.7x10 21 to 6.1×10 21 kg for Sedna [ 12 ] ).