Because Neatorama is a serious, hard news endeavor that seeks to educate the public about scientific developments, let us pause from our usual levity to talk to you about your Uranus.
In 2017, researchers Carol Paty and Xin Cao published the results of their examination of Uranus. Because that planet rotates on an axial tilt that is, relative to us, on its side, the magnetic field interacts in an unusual way with the passing solar wind. New Scientist explains:
Uranus is not like most of the planets. It rotates on its side, tilted almost 98 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun. The axis of its magnetic field is tilted too, at a 59-degree angle from the rotational axis. The magnetic field is also off-centre, with the field lines emerging about a third of the way toward the south pole.
All of this makes Uranus’s magnetosphere a total mess. “As it is tumbling around, the magnetosphere’s orientation is changing in all sorts of directions,” says Carol Paty at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. [...]
The magnetosphere acts as a barrier to the solar wind: when the two are moving in the same direction, the solar wind slides off it like water off a duck’s back. But just as when water hits a duck’s feathers from the tail end, the duck gets wet, so when the solar wind blows toward Uranus at the right angle, the planet’s magnetic field lines up with the solar wind’s and lets some particles flow through.
This process, called magnetic reconnection, occurs occasionally near Earth’s poles, where the influx of particles from the solar wind can lead to intensified auroras. On Uranus, Paty and Cao found that it should happen every single day (roughly 17 Earth hours), switching the magnetosphere’s protection on and off. This could lead to an aurora there as well.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: NASA
That’s a picture of Neptune, not Uranus.
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