The Uranus system may be even more interesting than we thought.
, it was the examination of particle and magnetic field data that provided the first hints that these are ocean moons.
"It isn't uncommon that energetic particle measurements are a forerunner to discovering an ocean world," study lead author Ian Cohen, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said in"We've been making this case for a few years now, that energetic particle and electromagnetic field measurements are important not just for understanding the space environment but also for contributing to the grander planetary science...
The findings will only strengthen the desire of planetary scientists to send spacecraft back to Uranus and Neptune to collect more data, which led to the suggestion of a $4.2 billionThis mission wouldn't be ready to launch until the early 2030s, so in the meantime, researchers have been diving back into old data collected during the Voyager 2 flyby to make new discoveries. instrument on Voyager 2, which characterized the population of trapped particles.
"What was interesting was that these particles were so extremely confined near Uranus' magnetic equator," Cohen said. He explained that this is strange because magnetic waves within the system would normally cause the particles to spread out, but these were cramped together near the planet's equator, between Ariel and Miranda.
The team had to eliminate the possibility that the crowded particles detected by Voyager 2 could be the result of the spacecraft flying through a chance plasma stream from the tail of Uranus' magnetosphere. They determined that, were this the case, the feature would have a broader spread of particles than were spotted by Voyager 2, thus allowing them to rule this out as an explanation for the unusual data feature.
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