The research team reported a surprising discovery of Uranus in the old Voyager data

In data from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, a research team found a surprise on Uranus. Other secrets can still be hidden in the data.

Greenbelt – NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft launched in August 1977 on a grand tour of the solar system, visiting many planets on its way to the outer solar system. Eight and a half years after its launch, Voyager 2 has flown past the mysterious, frozen planet Uranus. Up to about 81,000 kilometers away, the space probe approached the planet and collected a lot of data. In this data, the researchers found, among other things, two new rings and eleven previously unknown moons of Uranus.

The data provided by Voyager 2 from Uranus are unique to this day – no space probe has ever approached this planet again. Even today, there seem to be secrets in the data waiting to be revealed. This is shown by a study in 2019 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters published had become.

Surprise in data from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft

Originally, Gina DeBraccio and Dan Gershman of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center were looking for mysteries surrounding Uranus that a new mission to the ice giant could solve. To do this, the research team first looked at the planet’s magnetic field, which is very strange and unusual in research. So the two researchers got magnetometer data from the Voyager 2 flyby and looked at the data at great magnification.

In doing so, they discovered something that was already known from other planets but never before seen on Uranus: a plasmid. When Voyager 2 visited the planet, Uranus was losing a huge bubble of plasma, and with it parts of its atmosphere. The entire structure was about 200,000 km long and 400,000 km thick, as the research team was able to show using ancient data. For comparison: the Earth’s diameter is about 12,700 km.

Uranus ejected a giant plasmoid while Voyager 2 flew by

Plasmodiums are thought to be an important way planets lose parts of their mass and atmosphere. These are huge bubbles of plasma pinched from the planet and separated. These processes have already been observed on Earth and on other planets – on Uranus they were still completely unknown at that time, like NASA in one communication mentioned. The research team also discovered what the plasmoid is made of: mostly ionized hydrogen.