Researchers looked through almost 40-year-old data from the NASA Voyager 2 mission and found something unexpected.
When it comes to searching for habitable locations in our solar system and beyond, one of the key requirements for life as we know it is the presence of liquid water. Whether that’s a liquid water ocean on the planet’s surface like we have here on Earth, or an ocean beneath a thick, icy crust, which is thought to be found on some of Jupiter’s icy moons, this is the first and most important indicator of potential habitability.
So it’s exciting to learn that two of Uranus’ moons may also host oceans. Though it is rarely studied because it is located so far from the sun, Uranus is known to host 27 moons, as well as rings, though all these moons are small at less than half the size of our moon. Researchers looked through almost 40-year-old data from the NASA Voyager 2 mission, which passed Uranus in 1985, to learn more about the energetic particles and magnetic fields around the planet.
