The Pin
March 27 2020, 5:59 am
Voyager 2 space probe conducted in 1986 one of the few studies of Uranus, the seventh planet in the solar system. Now, more than 30 years later, physicists Gina DiBraccio and Dan Gershman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center analyzed data from the ancient mission to study Uranus’ strange magnetic field.
In their study, the results of which were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, they found that Voyager 2 flew through a plasmoid, a giant magnetic bubble, a fact that went unnoticed more than three decades ago.
Plasmoids, giant bubbles of plasma, or electrified gas, cause planets to lose mass, NASA explains. Over time they can drain ions from the atmosphere of a planet, and in this way introduce fundamental changes in their composition. They had previously been observed on other planets, including Earth, but never on Uranus.
According to the researchers’ estimates, plasmoids like the ones Uranus crossed could represent a loss of atmospheric mass of between 15% and 55% for the planet. DiBraccio and Gershman estimated a cylindrical shape of the detected plasmoid at least 204,000 kilometers long and up to 400,000 kilometers wide.
Like all planetary plasmoids, the authors believe it was filled with charged particles, primarily ionized hydrogen. The discovery now raises new questions about Uranus’ magnetic environment, a planet that in many ways can be considered unique in the solar system.
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