About A Year Ago, We Mentioned "Mushballs" -- In Jupiter's Vast Cloud Layers; Now They May ALSO Explain "Missing" Ammonia, On Neptune And Uranus?

We return to that graphic at right -- and update the masthead overnight, to point out that these giant mushy hails stones likely explain why the predicted levels of ammonia are NOT seen in the atmospheres of all three gas giants.

As is often true, a discovery on one planet helps us rethink our hypotheses. . . for others. Thus:

. . .The new theory could be an answer to why observations in infrared and radio wavelengths of Uranus and Neptune have shown that both planets lack ammonia in their atmosphere compared to other gas giant planets. Mushballs could be extremely effective at carrying ammonia deeper into the planet’s atmosphere, making it hard to detect beneath the dense clouds of the atmosphere. . . .

"Previously, scientists realized there were small pockets of missing ammonia, but no one realized how deep these pockets went or that they covered most of Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "We were struggling to explain the ammonia depletion with ammonia-water rain alone, but the rain couldn't go deep enough to match the observations. I realized a solid, like a hailstone, might go deeper and take up more ammonia. When Heidi discovered shallow lightning, we realized we had evidence that ammonia mixes with water high in the atmosphere, and thus the lightning was a key piece of the puzzle. . . ."

We now believe the same mechanism explains the relative dearth of ammonia in the upper reaches of both Uranus and Neptune. Cool. Literally -- cool.



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