[X] My Assistant

[mcaplinger]

"The anomalous state of Uranus’s magnetosphere during the Voyager 2 flyby", Jasinski et al, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02389-3

The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually oblique and off-centred magnetic field. This single in situ measurement has been the basis of our interpretation of Uranus’s magnetosphere as the canonical extreme magnetosphere of the solar system; with inexplicably intense electron radiation belts and a severely plasma-depleted magnetosphere. However, the role of external forcing by the solar wind has rarely been considered in explaining these observations. Here we revisit the Voyager 2 dataset to show that Voyager 2 observed Uranus’s magnetosphere in an anomalous, compressed state that we estimate to be present less than 5% of the time.