This opening and closing happens around Earth, and it’s called magnetic reconnection – where the magnetic field lines of our magnetosphere and the solar wind align. This produces aurorae at its poles, and it’s likely doing the same at Uranus. But at Earth, this process is fairly irregular. At Uranus, it seems to be much more frequent.

“As it is tumbling around, the magnetosphere’s orientation is changing in all sorts of directions,” Paty told New Scientist. The planet is really weird already. It rotates at almost a right-angle to the planet of its orbit around the Sun, something no other planet does.

This may have been caused by a collision with an Earth-sized object long ago





Its magnetic field is equally weird. It’s tipped by about 60 degrees to the planet’s rotation, and is also offset from the center by about one-third of the planet’s 25,360-kilometer (15,760 miles) radius. On Earth, and indeed other planets, our magnetic field lines come from pretty near our geographic poles – although magnetic north and south changes a bit. Not so on Uranus.





Unfortunately, though, we’ve got a very little information about Uranus. Most of our data comes from the flyby of Voyager 2 in 1986, our only spacecraft to ever visit this planet. NASA is currently considering proposals to send an orbiter to Uranus in the next decade or two, which would greatly increase our understanding.





But for now, we’ve got to rely on models like this latest study. This basically modeled Uranus and its magnetosphere as a whole, and it closely matched the data gathered by Voyager 2. It seems that the rotation of the planet might be driving its changing magnetic field. “That’s completely different from the Earth or any of the other planets,” Paty told Gizmodo.







