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Buried inside data that NASA's iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft gathered at Uranus more than 30 years ago is the signature of a massive bubble that may have stolen a blob of the planet's gassy atmosphere. That's according to scientists who analyzed archived Voyager 2 observations of the magnetic field around Uranus. These measurements had been studied before, but only using a relatively coarse view. In the new research, scientists instead looked at those measurements every two seconds. That detail showed what had previously been missed: an abrupt zigzag in the magnetic field readings that lasted just one minute of the...

Just a couple of days ago, NASA helped spot a new batch of sunspots and the flares arcing above them. In a new blog post, NASA explains that the flares weren’t particularly powerful and didn’t register with NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, but NASA’s own hardware was able to detect them. The space agency suggests that the sunspots and flares could be an indication that the star is becoming more active yet again. The Sun typically runs on cycles that last around 11 years on average. During times of high activity, called the solar maximum, sunspots and flares are frequent....

As NASA reports in a new post, researchers recently discovered that Voyager 2 cruised through a blob of charged gas called a plasmoid as it passed the planet. The spacecraft’s journey through the plasmoid lasted only about a minute, but that was still long enough for scientists to spot the anomaly in the decades-old data. The scientists believe that gas loss may have already drained as much 55% of the planet’s atmosphere. Loss of atmosphere resulting in plasmoids has been observed around other planets in our solar system, including Saturn and Jupiter, though it’s thought that Uranus has leaked far...