New research at UC Berkeley offers a fresh perspective on Uranus and Neptune's interiors, indicating layered structures of water and hydrocarbons. These findings account for the planets' unusual magne

A planetary scientist proposes that the interiors of Uranus and Neptune are layered, with deep oceans of water above compressed carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen.

When NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made its way to outer regions of the solar system in the late 80's, it noticed something odd. Both of the ice giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, lacked what's known as a "dipole magnetic field." This was in stark contrast to our own rocky world, as well as the two gas giants Jupitar and Saturn.

A scientist simulated the contents of the ice giant worlds, and found that a fluid layer may explain each planet’s strange magnetic field.

According to Militzer, Earth, which has a neat, bar-magnet-like magnetic field generated by its molten iron core, Uranus and Neptune's magnetic fields are a mess, discovered to be disorganized during NASA’s Voyager 2 flybys in the late 1980s. That chaotic structure pointed to something unusual inside the planets.

New models using Voyager 2 data show that separate layers in the planets’ mantles could be creating disordered magnetic fields.

Uranus and Neptune were only visited once by human spacecraft when Voyager 2 passed by them almost 40 years ago. During those visits, scientists measured peculiar magnetic fields unlike those seen around other planets.