The Voyager 2 spacecraft captured this image of the planet Uranus during its 1986 flyby. 
NASA/JPL-Caltech

The answers to the biggest questions in space science — what happens inside a black hole, how does a galaxy form or what is dark matter — lie in the far reaches of the universe.However, there is still plenty that scientists don’t know about the solar system, our cosmic neighborhood.

This week, researchers shared fascinating new findings on Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, and the far side of the moon.


Illustrations depict how Uranus' magnetosphere, or protective bubble, was behaving before Voyager 2's arrival (left) and during the spacecraft's flyby (right). NASA/JPL-Caltech
What’s known about Uranus could be off the mark. An unusual cosmic occurrence during the Voyager 2 spacecraft’s 1986 flyby might have skewed how scientists characterized the ice giant, new research suggests.

In particular, the spacecraft’s observations of Uranus’ protective magnetosphere were wildly different from astronomers’ expectations.

The new study found that when Voyager 2 was taking its readings intense solar wind created conditions that happen 4% of the time, said Jamie Jasinski, a space plasma physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The unusual circumstances likely distorted data collected by researchers.

Fortunately, sending a dedicated mission to study Uranus in the future is a priority for NASA, according to a 2022 report.

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Fifty years ago this month, paleoanthropologist Don Johanson discovered what’s perhaps the world’s most famous fossil: the skeleton of Lucy, which offered the first proof that ancient hominins were already walking upright 3.2 million years ago.

However, the monumental find almost didn’t happen. Working in Ethiopia’s Afar region on November 24, 1974, Johanson caught a glance of a fragment of bone as he looked over to his right. “If I had looked over my left shoulder, I would have missed it,” he said.

Excavating Lucy’s fragile bones took Johanson and his colleagues 2 ½ weeks. But her legacy as the first documented specimen of Australopithecus afarensis fueled decades of scientific research and debate, opening a new chapter in the human story.