(ORDO NEWS) — Flying past Uranus almost 40 years ago, the Voyager 2 probe detected a population of high-energy particles trapped in its magnetic field.
Scientists speculate that this cluster of ions could be fueled by emissions from the moons of Ariel or Miranda, indicating the presence of a subsurface ocean on at least one of them.
The planet Uranus is an ice giant with its own ring system and almost three dozen moons.
Its axis is strongly deviated from the plane of the orbit, and, unlike the rest of the planets of the solar system, Uranus rotates “on its side”, turning to the Sun either by the equator, or by one or the other pole.
However, it still remains much less studied than Jupiter or Saturn. Scientists are only discussing the possibility of sending a special mission to the Uranus system.
So far, the only spacecraft that has briefly visited the vicinity of Uranus is Voyager 2, which flew by in 1986.
Scientists recently returned to the data collected by the probe’s then-operating LECP detector and looked at the population of high-energy particles trapped in the planet’s magnetic field.
A new analysis has shown that this feature may indicate the presence of oceans on Miranda and (or) Ariel, large satellites of the ice giant.
Ian Cohen and his colleagues at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University noted that the particles detected by Voyager 2 are not distributed widely, but are stored in a relatively limited region, approximately halfway between the orbits of the Ariel and Miranda satellites.
This indicates that the population has a source that constantly feeds it, like ejecta from under the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Geysers and some other features of Enceladus indicate that a fairly extensive ocean of liquid water is hidden under its icy crust.
Therefore, Cohen and co-authors made an assumption about the presence of similar reservoirs on the moons of Uranus – Ariel and Miranda – or at least on one of them.
Some features of the surface of these celestial bodies, seen during the flyby of Voyager 2, can speak of the same.
The images obtained at that time show areas that may be traces of spilled and frozen water. Moreover, the probe saw similar details on three other large moons of Uranus: Umbriel, Oberon and Titania.
Perhaps they all have oceans, but to find out definitively, we will have to wait for a new space mission to be sent to visit the system of a distant ice giant.
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