Lifeboat Foundation

When NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, it provided scientists’ first—and, so far, only—close glimpse of this strange, sideways-rotating outer planet. Alongside the discovery of new moons and rings, baffling new mysteries confronted scientists. The energized particles around the planet defied their understanding of how magnetic fields work to trap particle radiation, and Uranus earned a reputation as an outlier in our solar system.

Now, new research analyzing the data collected during that flyby 38 years ago has found that the source of that particular mystery is a cosmic coincidence. It turns out that in the days just before Voyager 2’s flyby, the planet had been affected by an unusual kind of space weather that squashed the planet’s magnetic field, dramatically compressing Uranus’s magnetosphere.

“If Voyager 2 had arrived just a few days earlier, it would have observed a completely different magnetosphere at Uranus,” said Jamie Jasinski of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and lead author of the new work published in Nature Astronomy. “The spacecraft saw Uranus in conditions that only occur about 4% of the time.”