
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Get ready to giggle and make bad jokes. Uranus is back in the news. In 1986, Voyager 2 flew by the distant ice giant and made a strange discovery—the planet's magnetic field was weird. It's not just weird; it's unlike every other planet in the solar system. For nearly 40 years, scientists have tried to understand why. To solve the mystery, researchers delved into the data collected by Voyager 2 and found a "cosmic coincidence". The solar wind was unusually strong just prior to the flyby, causing the strange observations. This is good news for Uranus's moons, which were thought to be inactive as a result of the Voyager 2 findings. Join planetary scientist Beth Johnson and space plasma physicist Jamie Jasinski from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as they discuss the initial observations, how the data was reevaluated, and what this all means for future missions to Uranus. (Recorded 12 December 2024.)
By SETI Institute4.5
66 ratings
Get ready to giggle and make bad jokes. Uranus is back in the news. In 1986, Voyager 2 flew by the distant ice giant and made a strange discovery—the planet's magnetic field was weird. It's not just weird; it's unlike every other planet in the solar system. For nearly 40 years, scientists have tried to understand why. To solve the mystery, researchers delved into the data collected by Voyager 2 and found a "cosmic coincidence". The solar wind was unusually strong just prior to the flyby, causing the strange observations. This is good news for Uranus's moons, which were thought to be inactive as a result of the Voyager 2 findings. Join planetary scientist Beth Johnson and space plasma physicist Jamie Jasinski from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as they discuss the initial observations, how the data was reevaluated, and what this all means for future missions to Uranus. (Recorded 12 December 2024.)

14,341 Listeners

948 Listeners

350 Listeners

1,355 Listeners

323 Listeners

2,883 Listeners

565 Listeners

235 Listeners

6,470 Listeners

2,369 Listeners

323 Listeners

118 Listeners

389 Listeners

163 Listeners

76 Listeners