Happy Discovery Day, Uranus!
It was on this day in 1781 that William Herschel observed Uranus (the planet, you immature nerds) and initially recorded it as a comet. However, he compared it to a planet and other astronomers at the time were suspicious of the comet classification due to its orbit around the sun appearing to be nearly circular. It eventually became accepted as the seventh planet.
Uranus was also instrumental in discovering Neptune due to perturbations in its (Uranus’) orbit that could only be explained by the existence of another planet out there somewhere.
So that’s pretty cool.
AAAAAA THIS IS COOL
So the sole flyby we’ve ever done of Uranus was by Voyager 2 in 1986. Of the many odd things about this planet, one extra strange thing observed by the spacecraft involved Uranus’ magnetic field. Namely, despite having radiation belts in its magnetosphere that were second only to Jupiter in intensity, there was no clear source of the energized particles or plasma that fed the belts.
However, new analyses of the 1986 data suggests that an unusual solar wind event may have been taking place during Voyager 2’s flyby of the planet, causing a change in its magnetosphere and temporarily stripping it of the plasma. According to scientists, these conditions occur about 4% of the time, and they just so happened to be taking place during the flyby. They suspect that Uranus’ magnetic field would have looked quite different had the flyby taken place even just a few days earlier.
Isn’t that wild?
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