By Ernest Gill
Hamburg - Uranus may be responsible for the recent Asian earthquakes because the mystery-shrouded "planet of calamity" is unusually close to the Earth, tabloid newspaper readers in Germany were warned on Wednesday.
Under the front-page headline "Uncanny Uranus", the report in Bild newspaper cited an array of experts, ranging from Nasa scientists to TV astrologers, saying the seventh planet from the sun possesses a "quadripolar" magnetic field that acts as "a giant cosmic vacuum cleaner".
This heavenly Hoover is literally sucking the Earth's tectonic plates out of their beddings, according to Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper with more than five million readers.
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The axis of Uranus is tilted at right angles to all other planets This magnetic pull is strongest along the Earth's equator because the tropics are marginally closer to Uranus than the poles are.
The magnetic forces "are strong enough at the equator to suck up electrically charged dust particles" which could, in turn, disturb the Earth's crust and spawn killer undersea quakes, resulting in tidal waves.
The reason these natural phenomena have increased of late is that the distant planet's orbit has brought Uranus uncomfortably close to Earth.
Instead of being its usual 3.14-billion kilometres from Earth, Uranus currently is a mere 2.59-billion kilometres away.
And it will remain this close through the year 2012, so Bild warns that we could be in for more uncanny Uranian catastrophes well into the next decade until Uranus slowly retreats back into its proper place in the Outer Solar System.
'That is a harbinger of disaster' "With its 11 rings and 18 moons, Uranus is in fact different from everything else in our Solar System," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist since 1972.
The German paper quoted Stone at length, saying that Voyager 2 had raised almost more questions than it had solved.
Since launch on August 20, 1977, Voyager 2's itinerary has taken the spacecraft to Jupiter in July 1979, Saturn in August 1981, then becoming the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune, in 1986 and 1989 respectively. Both Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, will eventually leave our solar system and enter interstellar space.
Voyager 2's images of the five largest moons around Uranus revealed complex surfaces indicative of varying geologic pasts. The cameras also detected 10 previously unseen moons. Several instruments studied the ring system, uncovering the fine detail of the previously known rings and two newly detected rings.
Voyager data showed that the planet's rate of rotation is a brisk 17 hours, 14 minutes. The spacecraft also found that uncanny Uranian magnetic field that is both large and unusual.
Because the axis of Uranus is tilted at right angles to all other planets, its rings are at 90 degrees to the planet's orbit about the sun.
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