Some new facts about the planets of our home solar system are surprising. It is to this kind of discoveries that some information about Uranus belongs.
Who would have thought that even thirty years ago, most scientists considered the solar system a rather boring place (well, maybe with the exception of Jupiter and Saturn). It seemed that our Earth revolves around the Sun in the company of few remarkable pieces of stone, where there is practically nothing interesting. All the more surprising is the latest information, for example, about Uranus.
Uranus is a completely unique planet. As it was already known, the plane of the equator of Uranus is tilted to the plane of its orbit at an angle of 98 ° – that is, the planet rotates retrograde, as if lying on its side. This leads to serious consequences. If the rest of the planets of the solar system are more like spinning tops, then Uranus is more like a rolling ball. This affects the change of day and night on the planet, as well as its magnetic field.
A new study by the Georgia Institute of Technology shows that Uranus’s magnetic field rotates with the planet, literally changing its poles every day.
The Earth’s magnetosphere is organized around the North and South Poles. Moreover, if these poles suddenly change places, then our planet could face a real catastrophe. And on Uranus, a similar catastrophe occurs every day. Its magnetosphere is chaotic, tilted at an angle of 60 degrees to the planet’s axis of rotation, and therefore it is sometimes “open” and sometimes “closed”.
Study authors Carol Paty and Qin Kao, using digital models based on data from Voyager 2, were able to simulate the activity of Uranus’s magnetic field and uncover some of its mysteries, including how it blows in the solar wind every day. then it blocks it.
This discovery was made thanks to data from Voyager 2, which only flew past the planet in 1986. What will we find when we send a separate mission there?