• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The Radiation Belt Of Uranus Isn’t Weak, It’s Just Lopsided

July 11, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

It’s almost forty years since Voyager 2 checked out Uranus, leaving some great mysteries behind. Three planetary scientists think they’ve shown two of these are connected – why its proton radiation belts are so weak and why its magnetic field is off-kilter – possibly solving one.

Advertisement

Magnetic fields affect the movements of charged particles, and a powerful field like the Earth’s causes high-energy particles from space to circle the planet. The interaction of particles from the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field produces the Van Allen Belts (those things Moon landing deniers claim cannot be crossed by living things), protecting the atmosphere in the process.

Other planets with magnetic fields have similar belts, but Uranus and Neptune’s magnetic fields are weird. In the case of Uranus, it is tilted almost 60 degrees from the planet’s axis of rotation, unlike those of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are much more aligned. It’s also not centered near the middle of the planet, but rather a third of the way to the south pole. Voyager 2 reported the magnetic field is strong, but the radiation belt is weak. Imperial College London PhD student Matthew Acevski and colleagues argue that’s partly because of the decentered nature of the field.

Using the Boris algorithm, a method to calculate the movements of charged particles, Acevski and co-authors tested how the asymmetrical magnetic field should affect the behavior of protons that become captured. They found that the field asymmetry causes particles to move at different speeds while circling. Protons build up at locations where they move slowly and spread out where their movement is faster.

“This is analogous to how traffic jams form on a ring road. When cars travel slower, it causes more dense traffic; if cars travel faster, the traffic is more spread out,” Acevski told Space.com. 

Since Voyager 2 did not orbit Uranus, but only checked it out on the way past, the authors suspected it’s not so much that the radiation belt is weak, but that our only visitor happened to measure a depleted area.

Advertisement

The team modeled where the protons would move faster and slower and concluded Voyager 2 passed through an area of depletion.

Notably, the effect only really applies to protons. Electrons’ masses are so much lower that their paths are barely altered by the asymmetry, consistent with Voyager 2 reporting a strong electron radiation belt.

As neat as this is, the authors acknowledge their work doesn’t explain measurements as low as Voyager 2 made. “It is possible that with the inclusion of more complex system dynamics this effect compounds to be a more significant contribution to this deficiency,” they write. 

If the proposed Uranus orbiter comes to fruition, the unexplained portion of the weakness may be one of the easier mysteries to solve, but whether this will happen while Mars Sample Return consumes most of NASA’s exploration budget is uncertain.

Advertisement

Neptune’s magnetic field is almost as angled as that of Uranus, but Voyager’s measurements of its proton radiation belt were strong. Whether this difference is real, or a consequence of the areas Voyager 2 passed through remains to be seen.

The study is published open access in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

[H/T Eos]

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  2. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  3. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch
  4. Ancient DNA Reveals People Caught Leprosy From Adorable Woodland Critters In Medieval England

Source Link: The Radiation Belt Of Uranus Isn't Weak, It's Just Lopsided

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Black Hole Moon: Rogue Planets With Weird Signatures Could Be A Sign Of Advanced Alien Life
  • World’s Largest Ephemeral Lake Set To Turn Iconic Peachy Pink After Extreme Flooding
  • Stunning New JWST Observations Give Further Evidence That Dark Matter Is A Real Substance
  • How Big Is This Spider? Study Explains Why You Might Overestimate Their Size
  • Orcas Sometimes Give Humans Presents Of Food And We Don’t Know Why
  • New Approach For Interstellar Navigation Was Tested On A Spacecraft 9 Billion Kilometers Away
  • For Only The Second Recorded Time, Two Novae Are Visible With The Naked Eye At Once
  • Long-Lost Ancient Egyptian City Ruled By Cobra Goddess Discovered In Nile Delta
  • Much Maligned Norwegian Lemming Is One Of The Newest Mammal Species On Earth
  • Where Are The Real Geographical Centers Of All The Continents?
  • New Species Of South African Rain Frog Discovered, And It’s Absolutely Fuming About It
  • Love Cheese But Hate Nightmares? Bad News, It Looks Like The Two Really Are Related
  • Project Hail Mary Trailer First Look: What Would Happen If The Sun Got Darker?
  • Newly Discovered Cell Structure Might Hold Key To Understanding Devastating Genetic Disorders
  • What Is Kakeya’s Needle Problem, And Why Do We Want To Solve It?
  • “I Wasn’t Prepared For The Sheer Number Of Them”: Cave Of Mummified Never-Before-Seen Eyeless Invertebrates Amazes Scientists
  • Asteroid Day At 10: How The World Is More Prepared Than Ever To Face Celestial Threats
  • What Happened When A New Zealand Man Fell Butt-First Onto A Powerful Air Hose
  • Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements
  • Earth’s Weather Satellites Catch Cloud Changes… On Venus
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version