Thermal equilibrium.

That's a term of art that I've learned, thanks to Dr. Ken Croswell, writing most recently

of simultaneous revelations by two teams that Ken tells me are independent of each other,

but the independence is now a way of validating their discoveries.

Ken's writing this for science news.

Uranus is the cold giant, the ice giant, that is sideways.

That's a way to remember it.

Every other planet has an equator that is roughly tilted this way or tilted that way.

Uranus is tilted all the way, and it's odd.

But now I understand it's even odder because it's revealed something that heretofore was assumed,

otherwise, that all the heat

measured from the surface of the atmosphere was from our sun, not from Uranus.

Ken, a very good evening to you. This is wonderful to introduce yet another mystery of our solar

system. What is it that the separate teams, independent of each other, have discovered that is contradictory

to what emerged from Voyager 2 many years ago?

Good evening to you.

Good evening, John.

Yes, these two research teams didn't even know about each other just a few weeks ago, and yet

they were

working on the same thing and came to the same conclusion. Some background. Voyager 2, the wonderful

spacecraft that explored the giant planets of our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune

flew past the planet Uranus in 1986. And unlike for the other three giant planets, it did not

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