A Long-Held Assumption About Uranus Just Got Upended

Decades of data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope has given an international team of astronomers fresh insight into what’s going on with Uranus. A new analysis, published in Nature Astronomy, calculates the spin of one of our solar system’s most understudied planets with unprecedented precision. A human-made object has visited the seventh planet from the Sun just once. On January 24, 1986, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft conducted a flyby, gathering some of the most comprehensive data scientists have had access to when it comes to Earth’s distant neighbor. That included some oddities, such as the fact that Uranus’ magnetic field was both highly tilted and offset. By comparing measurements of that field, astronomers were able to estimate the planet’s rotation at 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds. However, there was a margin of error of 36 seconds built into that calculation. That may seem small, but as the astronomers noted in their new paper, it was enough that observers were no ... Read full article.