Uranus’s moon Miranda
NASA/JPL/USGS
The moons of Uranus may have short-lived atmospheres each time the seasons change. The seasons there are so intense that these tenuous atmospheres, referred to as exospheres, may exist briefly twice each Uranian 12 months earlier than freezing and falling again right down to the floor.
Uranus’s poles are extraordinarily tilted with respect to the planet’s orbit around the solar, which, together with its highly effective magnetic discipline, makes the seasons there notably excessive. Ben Teolis at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas and his colleagues used laboratory experiments on how carbon…