magnetic field

A planet’s magnetic field traps any gases and other material coming off the planet and its moons.

They also showed that Uranus’s protective magnetic field was strangely distorted.

The new research shows that just as Voyager 2 flew past Uranus, the Sun was raging, creating a powerful solar wind that might have blown the material away and temporarily distorted the magnetic field.

It’s intellectually interesting to know that the faint gray smudge barely visible on the horizon is the result of literal pieces of the sun that have been blasted toward you at hundreds of miles a second, funneled into our atmosphere by Earth’s magnetic field and induced to emit light via graduate school physics concepts.

The first colonists would encounter a barren landscape without water or breathable atmosphere, bathed in deadly solar and galactic radiation from which Earthbound humans are protected by our planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field.