Scientists initially missed the discovery because the dust ring was invisible.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA – Scientists have discovered a new mystery about the ring planet Uranus buried deep in the data of the iconic mission Traveler 2 United States Air Force and Space Administration (NASA). Voyager 2 flew over Uranus in January 1986.
Viyager 2 discovered 10 moons and two rings and became the first and only spacecraft to visit the ice giant. One of those rings, which scientists call the zeta ring, has since frustrated astronomers. They haven’t even been able to find it again for nearly two decades.
But last year, researchers got the unexpected: new images of Uranus’ ring system, including zeta ring which is elusive, courtesy of amateur image processor Ian Regan. “For a long time we thought we only had two images of this ring from Voyager 2,” said Matthew Hedman, a planetary scientist at the University of Idaho, during a presentation at the American Astronomical’s Division of Planetary Sciences annual meeting. Society on October 5th. Space, Friday (14/10/2022).
“This shows that there is a lot of information still encoded in the Voyager data that is worth a second look.”
Scientists initially missed the discovery because the reddish dusty ring closest to Uranus is not visible in all images. Rehan had to combine a series of images together to bring up the feature.
“He took hundreds of images, stacked them together, to produce this image of the Uranus system. This is the most complete view of the existing zeta ring and we didn’t know it was in the Voyager data for decades, ”Hedman said.
The new image combined with two previous photos of Voyager gave Hedman and his colleagues enough information to calculate the distance of the ring from Uranus, about 23,000 miles (37 one thousand kilometers) above the planet and to estimate its brightness.
But the two values are confusing. The Keck Observatory in Hawai’i collected the first observations of a zeta ring from Voyager 2 in 2007. These observations show a ring at 25 one thousand mil (40 one thousand km) above the planet – slightly farther from Uranus than Voyager 2 observations suggest.
“The trick is that the position of this ring doesn’t match the Voyager image. Something has changed in this ring over the past 20 years. We’re not quite sure what it is yet, ”Hedman said of Keck’s remarks.
And the zeta ring has not been within inches of the planet for two decades it has gone unnoticed; it also recorded a stronger signal in Keck’s observations than in Voyager 2’s sights.
“It got significantly brighter, which means dust has been in the system for about 20 of those years. Now what is it? We don’t know, ”Hedman said.
Hedman suggested that Uranus may have been hit by a space rock that broke into debris and lodged in the zeta ring, or maybe a change in the seasons could be the cause, but those are just ideas. Whatever happened must have been dramatic enough to affect the rings, but it also escaped scientists’ radar.
NASA will begin planning major missions to explore the Uranus system in the coming years, but scientists will have no data from those missions for decades. However, Hedman notes that the James Webb Space Telescope captured a dazzling image of a similar ring around Neptune, which was released in September.
“Fortunately, there are telescopes that look very good at seeing the dusty rings around planets. So it might be fine, “she said.
