There is a new mystery about the rings of the planet Uranus.
The first and so far only mission to visit the ice giant was flown by Voyager 2 in January 1986. Astronomers couldn't find the zeta ring again for nearly two decades. Ian Regan, an amateur image processor, gave researchers a new image of the ring system.
Matthew Hedman, a planetary scientist at the University of Idaho, said that for a long time they thought they only had two images of the ring. There is a lot of information in the data that needs to be looked at again.
Scientists would like NASA to send a flagship mission to the strange planet.
Regan had to combine a lot of images together for the feature to appear. Hedman said that he took hundreds of images and stacked them together to make a picture of the uranian system. We didn't know that the zeta ring was in the data for decades.
The new image combined with the two previous ones gave Hedman and his colleagues enough information to calculate the ring's distance and brightness.
Both of those values are hard to understand. Since 2007, the first observations of the zeta ring have been gathered by the Keck Observatory. The ring is a bit farther from the planet than the observations show.
The location of the ring didn't match the images that were taken. Over the course of two decades, something had changed about this ring. We don't know what that was.
The zeta ring registered a stronger signal in the Keck observations than it did in the view of the ship.
Dust got introduced to the system after it got brighter. What happened to that? We don't know.
It was suggested by Hedman that a space rock that fragmented into debris and settled in the zeta ring could have been the cause of the crash. It must have been dramatic to have an effect on the rings.
Scientists won't have data from the upcoming NASA mission to explore the Uranus system for a couple of decades. The images of the rings around Neptune were captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
He said that there is a telescope that can look at dusty rings around planets. That may be nice.
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