A solar wind event days before the NASA probe flyby in 1986 may have compressed the planet’s magnetosphere, making it look odder than it usually is.
In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet, recording mysteries of its magnetic field. Turns out, Uranus may have just been in an unusual state. A solar wind event days before the flyby“We just caught it at this freak moment in time,” says Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “If you had known that going in, you would have questioned everything that Voyager 2 measured.
The pressure from that solar wind would have compressed Uranus’ magnetosphere, shrinking its extent from an estimated 28 times Uranus’ diameter to more like 17 times it within a week. The compression could account for both the lack of plasma and the intense radiation belts, Jasinski says.
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