An eyebrow-raising finding has been made by NASA scientists digging back into decades-old data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft: something seemed to have sucked the atmosphere of Uranus out into space.
When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, it appears to have passed through something called a plasmoid, essentially a gigantic plasma blob, that escaped Uranus and probably pulled along with it a giant gassy cloud of the fart-like atmosphere of the planet, Space.com reports.
According to Space.com, NASA claims that the plasmoid itself was around 127,000 miles long and twice as large based on the Voyager 2 data gathered as it passed through the planetary flatulence. And while the results, first published in August in the Geophysical Research Letters newspaper, can give NASA a better understanding of the atmosphere of Uranus, one gas bubble will not tell them all.
In a new press release, NASA researcher Gina DiBraccio said, "Imagine if one spacecraft just flew through this room and tried to characterise the entire Earth." "Obviously, nothing will show you what the Sahara or the Antarctic is like."
NASA speculates that a similar phenomenon of gas expulsion could explain how Mars came to be so dry and barren, but that can't be confirmed for sure. Unfortunately, NASA will need to send another spacecraft all the way out to Uranus and probe around in order to learn more, Space.com says.
DiBraccio said, "That's why I love planetary science." "You always go somewhere you really do not know."