If Voyager 2 had flown by Uranus days before or later, the planet's magnetosphere would have looked different. According to ...

"If the spacecraft had arrived only a few days earlier, the upstream solar wind dynamic pressure would have been ~20 times lower, resulting in a dramatically different magnetospheric configuration," ...

As a result, Uranus earned a decades-long reputation as an outlier in our solar system. But new research may be flipping that ...

"The Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus in 1986 revealed an unusually oblique and off-centred magnetic field," the researchers wrote.

Much of the knowledge about Uranus was gleaned when NASA's robotic spacecraft Voyager 2 conducted a five-day flyby in 1986 ...