The moons of the solar system|Voyager 2 imaged Uranus for five hours as it flew past the giant planet in January 1986. The moment was wrong. The solar storm distorted the measurements.
The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
The probe Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986. It took close-up pictures and collected a lot of measurement data.
Planetary researchers now believe that Voyager 2 whizzed past the giant planet at an unusual time.
At that time, there was a solar storm around Uranus, which caused its magnetic field to be abnormal.
Could primitive life still exist in the possible seas of the moon?
SOUNDER the flight past the large ice planet lasted only a short time, five hours. The timing went wrong.
Much of what we understand about the icy and bluish giant planet is based on that Voyager 2 flyby in 1986. And especially the measured data from it.
Even the close-ups, after almost 40 years, are still the only ones. It has now turned out that the measurement results have been misleading researchers all these years.
Uranus At the beginning of 1986, a solar storm hit nearby, i.e. a powerful particle eruption from the Sun.
The solar wind had a drastic effect on Uranus’ magnetosphere. Magnetospheres act as bubbles around the planets. They protect the planets from jets of gas or plasma that flow out of the Sun with the solar wind.
The strength of the solar wind fluctuated in 1986 website of Space.com along drastically. It affected the conditions of the ice planet and its moons, but only for a while.
Renew the results are presented in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
According to it, the moons of Uranus are not as sterile as has been thought. Maybe there is volcanism in Kui. From their oceans and oceans, something can also rush into space, like some other moons in our solar system.
If the moons, for example, are protected from the harsh radiation of space, primitive life can be found in the moons and their seas.
Voyager 2 was already sent into space in 1977. It and its sister ship Voyager 1 are now traveling outside our solar system. The connection with them still carries, although sometimes traveling.
Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in about January 1986 about 81,000 kilometers from the clouds of Uranus. The pictures were praised.
The seventh planet of our solar system had already been found about two hundred years earlier, in March 1781.
It was discovered by an astronomer with a telescope Sir William Herschel. However, not much was known about the planet before Voyager’s flyby.
Uranus differed from the other planets at the edge of the solar system.
The regions of Uranus’ magnetic field that trap energetic particles were surprisingly strong.
The observation broke “the theory of radiation at the time”, he says Jamie Jasinski. He is a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which studies space plasma.
Now Jasinski and his team are proposing that Voyager 2 flew by Uranus at an odd time.
AurInkomyrskyn therefore, the activity of the Sun was exceptional. The planet’s magnetic field was therefore distorted in the measurements.
Similar conditions prevail near Uranus for only four percent of the time, it has been calculated.
“If Voyager 2 had come close to the planet days earlier, we would have gotten a completely different picture of Uranus,” says Jasinski In a NASA announcement.
If The new observation by Jasinski’s group is true, it will also change our understanding of the moons of Uranus.
The five largest moons of Uranus could therefore offer opportunities for primitive life.
It is estimated that the four Uranus big hear there might be water under the surface.
The seas are not necessarily frozen. However, the nuclei can produce radioactive heat. It keeps the water melted.
Voyager 2 also photographed the moons of Uranus. The diameter of Miranda is just under 500 kilometers. The diameter of our own Moon is more than 3,700 kilometers.
Uranus the new interpretation of the flyby tells at least that researchers should also look back. That is, to the old data.
It will help scientists and space engineers as they design a new probe for Uranus.
Nasa is now planning a flight to Uranus for almost 40 years to flyby again.
The target would be Uranus only, for the first time in the history of probes.
The name of the probe is Uranus Orbiter and Probe at this time, so on the desktop. It would start its long journey in 2031 at the earliest. The probe would arrive near Uranus in 2044.
Before then, planetary scientists have time to carefully analyze the data collected by Voyager 2.
Voyager 2 is still traveling, now already in outer space more than 20 billion kilometers from Earth. There is still a connection to it.