Overview
- A Southwest Research Institute team reports in Geophysical Research Letters that Voyager 2 likely encountered a transient space-weather event at Uranus in 1986.
- Evidence points to a co-rotating interaction region compressing the magnetosphere and fueling strong chorus waves that accelerated electrons to extreme energies.
- The scenario mirrors a well-documented 2019 Earth event during solar minimum, when CIRs and chorus emissions coincided with unusually high relativistic electron fluxes.
- The analysis suggests Uranus’s intense electron belts observed by Voyager 2 were temporary rather than a stable background feature, possibly after the CIR depleted inner-magnetosphere plasma.
- With Voyager 2 still the only in-situ dataset, the authors say new missions are needed to confirm the mechanism and to assess implications for outer planets such as Neptune.