Uranus may have looked weird when NASA’s Voyager 2 flew by
A solar wind event days before the NASA probe flyby in 1986 may have compressed the planet’s magnetosphere, making it look odder than it usually is.
A solar wind event just days earlier can have compressed the giant planet’s magnetosphere
When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus (shown here in a false-colour infrared image), the probe detected a weird and wonderful magnetic environment around the planet. Which could have been a fluke of timing.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
A lot of Uranus’ apparent oddities may perhaps be due to bad timing.
In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet, recording mysteries of its magnetic field. Turns out, Uranus can have just been in an unusual state. A solar wind event days sooner than the flyby compressed the giant planet’s magnetosphere, researchers report November eleven in Nature Astronomy. That compression may per chance explain several long-standing puzzles about Uranus and its moons, and may per chance inform planning for future missions (SN: four/20/22).
“We just caught it at this freak moment in time,” says Jamie Jasinski, an area plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Whenever you had known that entering into, you may still have the option to have questioned the entirety that Voyager 2 measured.”
Voyager 2 found that Uranus’ magnetosphere, the bubble of magnetism surrounding a planet, was once weird and wonderful. It perceived to lack plasma, a common portion of different planets’ magnetospheres. And it had inexplicably intense belts of energetic electrons.
Jasinski and colleagues looked back at data Voyager 2 collected months sooner than the flyby (SN: 2/1/86). The team found that the density and speed of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the sun, increased steadily for days.
The pressure from that solar wind would have compressed Uranus’ magnetosphere, shrinking its extent from an estimated 28 times Uranus’ diameter to more like 17 times it within per week. The compression may per chance account for both the lack of plasma and the extreme radiation belts, Jasinski says.
In truth, Uranus is within the state wherein Voyager 2 found it best four p.c.of the time, the team calculates. Meaning tons of what we find out about Uranus’ magnetosphere does now now not represent a standard day there.
“We don’t correctly know anything else about Uranus, because it was once a single flyby,” says Corey Cochrane, an area physicist also at JPL.
On the plus side, the logo new finding means it is able to per chance be more straightforward for some future mission to search for oceans beneath the surface of Uranus’ moons Titania and Oberon.
Astronomers can detect oceans on icy moons if they orbit within the magnetosphere (SN: 10/eight/24). Salty water responds to the magnetic field around it and produces its own magnetic field, which spacecraft can p.c. up. If Uranus’ magnetosphere is in most cases bigger than documented by Voyager 2, those moons ought to be well within it — and therefore good websites to search for subsurface seas.
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