Uranus is seen in this false-color view from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope from August 2003. The brightness of the planet's faint rings and dark moons has been enhanced for visibility.
NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Uranus 30 years ago, but researchers are still making discoveries from the data it gathered then. A new study led by University of Idaho researchers suggests there could be two tiny, previously undiscovered moonlets orbiting near two of the planet’s rings. Rob Chancia, a University of Idaho doctoral student, spotted key patterns in the rings while examining decades-old images of Uranus' icy rings taken by Voyager 2 in 1986. He noticed the amount of ring material on the edge of the alpha ring -- one of the brightest of Uranus' multiple rings -- varied periodically. A similar, even more promising pattern occurred in the same part of the neighboring beta ring.
"When you look at this pattern in different places around the ring, the wavelength is different -- that points to something changing as you go around the ring. There's something breaking the symmetry," said Matt Hedman, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Idaho, who worked with Chancia to investigate the finding. Their results will be published in The Astronomical Journal and have been posted to the pre-press site arXiv.
Chancia and Hedman are well-versed in the physics of planetary rings: both study Saturn's rings using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn. Data from Cassini have yielded new ideas about how rings behave, and a grant from NASA allowed Chancia and Hedman to examine Uranus data gathered by Voyager 2 in a new light. Specifically, they analyzed radio occultations -- made when Voyager 2 sent radio waves through the rings to be detected back on Earth -- and stellar occultations, made when the spacecraft measured the light of background stars shining through the rings, which helps reveal how much material they contain.
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