Uranus blasted a gas bubble 22,000 times bigger than Earth
Voyager 2’s iconic portrait of Uranus hides many details of a complex world, some of which are starting to come to light. (NASA/JPL/)There’s a giant blank spot in researchers’ ever-growing map of the solar system. Over the last two decades, a veritable fleet of probes has measured quakes on Mars, scrutinized the grooves in Saturn’s rings, observed jet streams on Jupiter, and heard the heartbeat of Pluto. But in terms of up-close-and-personal exploration, our image of Uranus hasn’t advanced substantially beyond the featureless blue beachball captured by Voyager 2’s vintage instruments in 1986.But last year, while combing through NASA’s archives, two planetary scientists noticed something earlier analyses had overlooked—a blip in Uranus’s magnetic field as the spacecraft cruised through a magnetic bubble of sorts. The new result, which appeared last summer in Geophysical Research Letters, comes as planetary scientists start to shift their focus to some of the field’s deepest...