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The penultimate planet, our best measurements suggest, has a whole slew of idiosyncrasies. And one of the most puzzling is its magnetic field. According to measurements taken by Voyager 2 when the NASA probe conducted a flyby in 1986, Uranus's magnetosphere is a hot mess – off-center and off-kilter, unlike anything else in the Solar System.
"I started looking at the solar wind data at Uranus, and then once I saw that Voyager 2 measured a dramatic increase in the solar wind dynamic pressure just before the flyby, I realized that the magnetosphere must have been squashed to 20 percent of its volume just before the flyby happened, which would have affected the discoveries we made with Voyager 2!"
"Out of thousands of orbits around the planet over a four-year period, we had these rare occasional times where activity from the Sun completely This means that outflows from the Sun – streams of particles escaping in a constant solar wind – had increased during the flyby, creating an environment around Uranus that is present less than 5 percent of the time, the team estimates.
If the solar wind was flowing at its normal rate, then Uranus's magnetic field would look more like the magnetic fields of the other gas giant planets of the Solar System,
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