Uranus is so WINDY that you could hear it from a helicopter, expert reveals

Uranus sounds windy - and not just the night after a big curry.

Dr Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University, has revealed what the mysterious planet is likely to sound like.

He explained: “[It] depends on where on Uranus you are. Uranus is what we call an ‘ice giant,’ and is composed almost entirely of gases and fluids, so there’s no real ground to stand on.

“From a distance – in other words, in space – there’s no sound at all (space is a vacuum, and sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum – or, at least, not very well), so you won’t be able to hear Uranus.

A massive storm on Uranus (NASA, ESA, A. Simon (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center))

There's a massive storm brewing on Uranus, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals  

“But within the atmosphere itself, there’s plenty of sound; there’s wind, which you could hear if you were able to fly through the atmosphere in a helicopter, say, or in a balloon.

“It’s extremely difficult and expensive to get any kind of vehicle to Uranus, so it’ll be a long time before we really do hear the planet’s weather, but it’s certainly possible.”

NASA and the Voyager space probe visit outer planets including Uranus

NASA's Voyager 2 has now entered Interstellar space and is still talking to Earth  

Surprisingly, only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus - NASA’s Voyager 2.

The spacecraft visited Uranus back in 1986, following a 1.8 billion mile journey that took nine years to complete.

Everything else we know about Uranus has come from observations via the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as several ground-based telescopes.