Uranus wasn't ready for its closeup 38 years ago. I speak of the 7th planet from the Sun, and third largest in our solar system, which received a flyby — 50,000 miles above the planet — from the ...

When the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first and only mission to fly by Uranus in 1986, it defined the way astronomers understand the ice giant. But the data collected by the probe also introduced ...

A flyby of Uranus in 1986 is where we gathered much of our knowledge about the distant ice giant, but new research has found that this may not have been a standard representation of the planet's ...

Uranus is more interesting than previously thought, scientists have found. Everything scientists know about the distant world has been thrown into question after reviewing the only mission to venture ...

NASA's Voyager 2 helped shape scientists' understanding of Uranus but also introduced unexplained oddities. A recent data dive has offered answers and renewed interest in the icy planet and its moons.

It's been a while since Uranus was probed up close, but old data is proving to be quite valuable in solving a few decades old oddities. The last spacecraft that flew by Uranus was NASA’s Voyager 2 in ...

When solar wind disturbances hit a planet’s magnetic field, they can trigger powerful electromagnetic waves called chorus waves. These waves act like a cosmic accelerator. They repeatedly “kick” ...

Some of Uranus’ apparent oddities might be due to bad timing. “We just caught it at this freak moment in time,” says Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in ...

Nearly 40 years after NASA’s Voyager 2 probed Uranus, three planetary scientists believe they may have cleared up a perplexing problem surrounding the methane rich planet and its ...

When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune 40 years ago, astronomers were surprised that it detected no global dipole magnetic fields, like Earth's. The explanation: the ice giants are layered and ...

The discovery challenges findings made by Voyager 2, which collected data suggesting Uranus, unlike other giant planets in the solar system, didn’t have an internal heat source. Reading time 2 minutes ...