Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989 and detected faint hints of auroras it couldn’t explain — because the magnetic field is tilted 47 degrees off the rotation axis and the auroras were glowing in entirely the wrong place

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured direct evidence of auroras on Neptune, according to findings published in Nature Astronomy, with lead author Henrik Melin of Northumbria University. The observations were made using Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph in June 2023.The result closes a gap that has sat in the planetary science literature for more than three decades. [...] The post Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989 and detected faint hints of auroras it couldn’t explain — because the magn