Follow
planet Uranus and its five biggest moons may not be the dead worlds that scientists have long thought
Dr Affelia Wibisono of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, who is independent of the research team, described the results as “very exciting” - “It shows how important it is to look back at old data, because sometimes, hiding behind them is something new to be discovered, which can help us design the next generation of space exploration missions”.
But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like what amazed scientists even more was the data Voyager 2 sent back indicating that the Uranian system was even weirder than they thought.
Linda Spilker was a young scientist working on the Voyager programme when the Uranus data came in. She is now still serving as the project scientist for the Voyager missions. She said that she was delighted to hear about the new results, which have been published in the Journal Nature Astronomy.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02389-3
Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa’s Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago.