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For the first sentence , uranologist have detected mysteriousX - raysflaring out of Uranus .
How is this happening?According to NASA scientists , Uranus is so massive that it could just be scattering X - rays give off by the sun more than a billion miles off . Or , perhaps the fine rings of dust surrounding Uranus are bring forth their own radiation through some unknown process . A closer cogitation of Uranus is call for to get laid for sure .
The blue body of Uranus glows (pink) with X-rays.
Uranus is cold , windy and made almost entirely of ice and throttle . Even though it ’s tremendous ( with a diameter about four timesEarth ’s ) , Uranus is hard to study in depth . Only one spacecraft — NASA ’s Voyager 2 — has ever made the perilous journey to the planet , storm scientists to rely mostly on telescope observations much closer to Earth for study the ice-skating rink giant .
In a newfangled field of study published March 31 in the journalJGR Space Physics , astronomers front at some archival observations of Uranus taken by NASA ’s Chandra X - Ray Observatory , an orbiting telescope that scours the universe for author of X - ray of light radiation therapy .
According to NASA , hug drug - ray are utter when subject is fire up to meg of degrees , like whenstars explodeor when matter whirl around the edge of ablack holeat near light speed . Until recently , X - electron beam discharge had been notice from every planet in thesolar systemexcept Uranus and Neptune . In most cases , these emissions occur when go - ray create by the sun clang into atoms in a planet ’s atmosphere , scattering the light back into blank .
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In the raw study , researcher search at Chandra data point taken from Uranus in 2002 and 2017 , and control cleared grounds of X - beam emission in both year . Several of these emissions had a brightness uniform with solar X - light beam being scattered back outward , the researchers wrote . However , in the 2017 observations , the team find a possible " flash " of X - ray , where the brightness of emissions around Uranus increase four time from one day to the next .
According to the researcher , " this may be significative of additional X‐ray emission unconscious process at Uranus , " besides mere solar scattering .
What mystical phenomenon could be generating the X - rays from Uranus ? One possibility lies in the planet ’s rings . According to the researchers , the surroundings around Uranus is robust in charged atom such as protons and negatron ; these particles could be collide into the planet ’s rings , grow 10 - ray of light in the process . ( A exchangeable phenomenon has been observed in Saturn ’s rings , the team pen . )
It ’s also potential that the X - rays are the result of some form of auroral process , in which excite particles from the sun are clash with Uranus ' magnetic - field lines and causing a distinct glow . However , further watching are required to flesh out this hypothesis . For now , the X - ray lights of Uranus continue a mystery .
Originally published on Live Science .
