C1-URANUS THE GIANT GAS PLANET ORBITING AROUND THE SUN

 By   Pragyansharma polavarapu  

Uranus is a giant gas planet nearly four times bigger than earth. Its radius is 24700 kilometers compared to earth’s radius of 6370 kilometers. It is at such a great distance from earth that it can be seen only in telescopes. It rotates around sun in 165 years. Its atmosphere is 99% composed of hydrogen and helium gases. It is called a gas giant. It has an earth sized hard stony central sphere .It has a thick atmosphere spreading thousands miles straight up from the ground with thick clouds of fine crystals of ammonia , methane and water ices . (Compared to it the earth’s atmosphere is only about 300 miles and dense gases in earth’s atmosphere exist only up to a height of about ten miles).Upper atmosphere of Uranus is unimaginably cold at about “minus 220 degrees” celsius. Scientists say that stormy winds there may blow with speeds of 2000 kilometers per hour. Scientists say that there may be frequent stormy and unimaginably cold rains containing fine ice crystals of ammonia, methane and water ices . Scientists also say that approximately at height of about 7000 miles above the ground element carbon gets separated from some of its chemical compounds containing carbon. The pure carbon  solidifies as diamond.  The diamond is  an “allotropic” form  of  carbon. So real purest diamonds , as we know on earth, form and rain down to the rocky surface 7000 kilometers below as hail stones! They fall straight down for thousands of miles to the ground. The hailstones made of pure diamond are  formed  when the super-cool methane(CH3) solid  dissociates into carbon and hydrogen .  Thus billions of diamonds big and small may always be raining  down to the ground through a very wet rainy cloudy stormy atmosphere as hail stones .If only we were  there in spite of the rain, cold, high pressure and suffocating poisonous gases! The diamond is so important for us as thing of fashion and glamour and symbol of high society here on planet earth! Scientists say that such diamond formation occurs on other “gas giant” planets( Jupiter,Saturn  and Neptune) also. The diamonds falling down on the ground for hundreds of millions of years might perhaps had created a diamond studded and diamond paved  high ground and diamond hillocks and diamond mountain ranges! What luck it would to mine diamonds there! At center of Uranus only an earth sized stony spherical mass exists like a small central nut inside a fruit. All above there are clouds full of tiny crystals of ammonia, methane and water ice upto a staggering height of about 15000 miles. Strange world but a real real world!