A plasmoid 22,000 times bigger than Earth erupted on Uranus during the Voyager 2 mission

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.

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More details about this new discovery on Uranus

Heidi Hummel, who is the Vice President for Science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, told Popular Science in an interview that since the Cassini Mission on Saturn is over, scientists are trying to find new facts about space. She also added that a lot of scientists are using the archived data to find more information.

Scientists have not explored Uranus with any probes till now. Therefore, DiBraccio and Gershman used the archived data on  Uranus to find more information about the blue planet. According to the portal, they manually processed and checked the data available from Voyager 2. Using this thirty-year-old data helped them to find something interesting.

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The scientists from Voyager 2 only calculated the magnetic field of Uranus as a whole but DiBraccio and Gershman decided to further analyze the data.  As per their research paper published on Geophysical  Research letters, the earlier scientists somehow overlooked the short variations in the magnetic field. They further analyzed and found that the magnetic field fluctuated rapidly for a certain 60 seconds. Gershman asked DiBraccio on an official interview published on the NASA website and enquired if this fluctuation was caused by a plasmoid.

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The plasmoids are charged gas bubbles which are blasted when solar wind affects a planet. A planet often loses such large gas bubbles and it changes the atmosphere of any planet. According to Popular Science, scientists can find more information after studying such gas bubbles or plasmoids.

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DiBraccio said to Popular Science in an interview that they knew that the blue planet has gas bubbles but they did not have any idea about how large such gas bubbles were in reality. She also added that these gas bubbles are similar to those seen on Saturn or Jupiter. But what makes the gas bubbles from Uranus distinct is that they hold more mass. This particular plasmoid was in a cylindrical shape which was nearly 22000 times bigger than the Earth.

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