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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...

A team of scientists from NASA used the old Voyager 2 data and found some interesting information about Uranus. Uranus had blasted a gas bubble of enormous size, it was nearly 22,000 times bigger than Earth. A detailed research report was published on NASA website recently. It was also published in the geophysical research Letters on 9th August 2019. Giba DiBraccio and Daniel Gershman, the two scientists who made this discovery on Uranus. found the data from the age-old data archive of NASA....Scientists have not explored Uranus with any probes till now. Therefore, DiBraccio and Gershman used the archived data...

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...