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Plenty of solar system objects emit X-rays — everything from Venus to Saturn to moons of Jupiter, the scientists write in a paper describing their research. In fact, of the solar system's planets, only little-studied Uranus and Neptune were missing from the list. The team of astronomers were particularly drawn to study Uranus in X-rays because the planet's alignments are quite jumbled: the planet lies on its side and the axis of its magnetic field is akimbo from both the orbital plane and the spin axis. The skewed axes may trigger particularly complicated auroras, which can emit X-rays. So the...

They may not be black or holes. Some astronomers believe there is a massive planet, far beyond the orbit of Neptune, orbiting the sun — but after years of searching, scientists have not found this theoretical world, which they've dubbed "Planet Nine." This has spurred theorists to consider a radical hypothesis: Perhaps Planet Nine is not a planet but rather a small black hole that might be detectable from the theoretical radiation emitted from its edge, so-called Hawking radiation. For centuries, astronomers have used variations in planetary orbits to predict the existence of new planets. When a planet's orbit doesn't...

...The frosty worlds surrounding planets like Jupiter and Saturn may indeed host life. We know there’s liquid water beneath the surface of some of them — it spews out into space on a regular basis — but we’ve yet to venture to those worlds to get a better look. Now, scientists say that the huge balls of ice around Uranus may also be a potential bastion for life....The moons of Uranus have endured impacts from objects in space, just like the rest of the worlds in our system, but there is also evidence that the moons aren’t just frozen wastelands....

A team of scientists from NASA used the old Voyager 2 data and found some interesting information about Uranus. Uranus had blasted a gas bubble of enormous size, it was nearly 22,000 times bigger than Earth. A detailed research report was published on NASA website recently. It was also published in the geophysical research Letters on 9th August 2019. Giba DiBraccio and Daniel Gershman, the two scientists who made this discovery on Uranus. found the data from the age-old data archive of NASA....Scientists have not explored Uranus with any probes till now. Therefore, DiBraccio and Gershman used the archived data...

Uranus is weird. It’s unlike any other planet in our solar system for a number of reasons, but its most bizarre feature is that it rotates at a roughly 90-degree angle to all the other planets. Scientists believe that its strange orientation is due to an impact that the planet sustained early in its life, but they’re just beginning to understand how this particular circumstance is affecting the planet on a day-to-day basis. In a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, scientists explain that, based on models of the planet and its magnetosphere, it’s likely that the...

The Uranus reversal begins a backward journey that will carry through early January 2021. Our surprises are about to get more baffling, random, disparate and mysterious. This is also very thrilling, as it provides the sort of work that requires making sense of the nonsense. Life is a puzzle, the solving of which will be extremely satisfying....

Uranus, far from Earth in the darker region of the Solar System's planetary reach, isn't alone. It's accompanied by a retinue of moons - 27, to be precise. Far and dim, these moons are difficult to study, but astronomers have made an accidental discovery while observing Uranus. According to infrared images of the five main moons of Uranus, their composition is closer to that of dwarf planets like Pluto and Haumea - compact, rocky objects with an icy crust - than the more fluffy composition of the smaller Uranian moons. Uranus orbits the Sun at an average distance around 20...

Uranus is visible to the naked eye if you know where to look.Stargazers, including those without binoculars or a telescope, have a chance to see one of our solar system's outermost planets for the next few days: Uranus. It's barely visible to the naked eye if you know where to look. The gas giant, which is the seventh furthest from the sun, will appear in the sky between 11:30 p.m. and 4 a.m., according to Joe Rao of Space.com. It will be located within the constellation Aries, about 12 degrees left of Mars. "It's already one-third up from the eastern...

While NASA proposes a mission to Neptune's moon, Triton, which could have an ocean capable of supporting life, researchers believe Neptune and Uranus are composed "primarily" of a strange form of water.

In a new study, scientists have devised a theoretical computer model and used it to peer inside the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. With this tool, the team studied the thermal and electrical conductivity of the unusual water inside of these planets. In simulating these physical processes on the teeny-tiny atomic scale, the researchers hope that this new model will reveal information about the icy bodies' internal structure, magnetic fields, how they evolved and exactly how old they are. In studying Uranus and Neptune with this model, the researchers, who stem from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in...

Buried inside data that NASA's iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft gathered at Uranus more than 30 years ago is the signature of a massive bubble that may have stolen a blob of the planet's gassy atmosphere. That's according to scientists who analyzed archived Voyager 2 observations of the magnetic field around Uranus. These measurements had been studied before, but only using a relatively coarse view. In the new research, scientists instead looked at those measurements every two seconds. That detail showed what had previously been missed: an abrupt zigzag in the magnetic field readings that lasted just one minute of the...

As NASA reports in a new post, researchers recently discovered that Voyager 2 cruised through a blob of charged gas called a plasmoid as it passed the planet. The spacecraft’s journey through the plasmoid lasted only about a minute, but that was still long enough for scientists to spot the anomaly in the decades-old data. The scientists believe that gas loss may have already drained as much 55% of the planet’s atmosphere. Loss of atmosphere resulting in plasmoids has been observed around other planets in our solar system, including Saturn and Jupiter, though it’s thought that Uranus has leaked far...

In 1781, an oboe player discovered the first new planet since antiquity. The History Guy recalls a solar system shattering event that represented an era of scientific inquiry. It is history that deserves to be remembered.

The rings of Uranus are invisible to all but the largest telescopes—they weren't even discovered until 1977—but they're surprisingly bright in new heat images of the planet taken by two large telescopes in the high deserts of Chile. The thermal glow gives astronomers another window onto the rings, which have been seen only because they reflect a little light in the visible, or optical, range and in the near-infrared. The new images taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) allowed the team for the first time to measure the temperature of the rings:...

Giant polar cap dominates Uranus; dark tempest is raging on Neptune. The two major planets beyond Saturn have only been visited once by a spacecraft, albeit briefly. NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft swung by Uranus in 1986, and Neptune in 1989. Our robotic deep-space tourist snapped the only close-up, detailed images of these monstrous worlds. For Neptune, the images revealed a planet with a dynamic atmosphere with two mysterious dark vortices. Uranus, however, appeared featureless. But these views were only brief snapshots. They couldn't capture how the planets' atmospheres change over time, any more than a single snapshot of Earth...

…[S]ientists have discovered enough planets around other stars to offer a clearer picture of the average solar system, and to reveal the ways in which our own solar system is really weird. For instance, most systems have gas giant planets, but those "hot Jupiters" tend to orbit very close to their host stars. That makes our solar system an outlier. All our system’s gas giants orbit in the outer solar system, while the inner region is reserved for rocky planets like our own. But according to a new simulation, our home system is even weirder than we thought. One of...

Can you spot Uranus in this photo? You may be surprised to learn... it is possible to see it with the naked eye — no telescopes or binoculars required. All you need is... an idea of where to look for it... Although telescopes and binoculars are not required to see Uranus on a dark, clear night, binoculars can come in handy when you're trying to locate it — especially for those with less-than-stellar eyesight.

The first recorded instance of Uranus being spotted in the night sky is believed to date back to Classical Antiquity. During the 2nd century BCE, Hipparchos - the Greek astronomer, mathematician and founder of trigonometry - apparently recorded the planet as a star in his star catalogue (completed in 129 BCE). This catalog was later incorporated into Ptolemy's Almagest, which became the definitive source for Islamic astronomers and for scholars in Medieval Europe for over one-thousand years... This included English astronomer John Flamsteed, who in 1690 observed the star on six occasions and catalogued it as a star in the...

The case for NGC 2419 as a lonely globular wandering the cosmic void between the galaxies is a romantic and intriguing notion, and one you see repeated around the echo chamber that is the modern web. First observed by Sir William Herschel in 1788 and re-observed by his son John in 1833, the debate has swung back and forth as to whether NGC 2419 is a true globular or—as has been also suggested of the magnificent southern sky cluster Omega Centauri—the remnant of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy torn apart by our Milky Way. Lord Rosse also observed NGC 2419 with...

The appearance of a massive white cap on Uranus may seem alarming, but as planetary scientists are learning, this is what a prolonged summer looks like on the remote ice giant. Ice giants Uranus and Neptune have water-rich interiors coated with hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of methane, the latter of which gives these outer planets their distinctive cyan complexion. Unlike Earth, where seasons last just a few months, Neptune and Uranus experience seasons that last for decades, resulting in strange and intense atmospheric phenomena. New images released by the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program highlight a evolving atmospheric...