PASADENA — When the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first and only mission to fly by Uranus in 1986, it defined the way astronomers understand the ice giant. But the data collected by the probe also introduced new mysteries that have continued to puzzle scientists in the decades since the historic flyby. Now, a new look at the data has revealed that Voyager 2 happened to zoom by the distant planet during a rare event, which suggests that scientists’ current understanding of the planet may have been shaped — and skewed — by an unusual stellar coincidence.
The findings of the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, may have solved some of the riddles created by Voyager 2’s odd Uranus readings. “The spacecraft saw Uranus in conditions that only occur about 4% of the time,” said lead study author Jamie Jasinski, space plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. The study results could also reinforce the idea that Uranus remains a largely misunderstood world, given that astronomers’ basic knowledge of the planet stemmed from an extraordinary anomaly.
But the spacecraft’s observations of Uranus’ magnetosphere were wildly different from astronomers’ expectations, and scientists deemed the planet an outlier among the other large planets in our solar system, such as Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. Magnetospheres are the protective bubbles around planets like Earth that have magnetic cores and magne.