Uranus - 52 Interesting facts

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1. Uranus is too dim for ancient civilizations to have seen it. It is the seventh planet from the Sun (Order of the planets from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (the dwarf planet)).



2. This is why there has been no mention of Uranus sightings before William Herschel saw it through his telescope in 1781. He had been surveying stars, including those that were ten times dimmer than visible stars.



3. When he looked through the telescope and saw a strange, slow-spinning object, Herschel wasn’t sure what he was looking at was a planet. The British astronomer thought it was a comet or a star. It took some time for others to confirm that Uranus was a planet because it follows a planetary orbit.



4. The funny thing is this makes Uranus the first planet to have been discovered in modern times! Ancient people had already scanned the skies and discovered six of the nine planets that we recognize today (the other modern discoveries were Neptune and Pluto (now classified as a dwarf planet), too dim to the naked eye).



5. Uranus is named after a Greek god, not Roman, like other planets.



6. If you love studying planets, you’ll know that most planets are named after Roman gods. Mars is the Roman god of war, for instance. Uranus, however, is named after the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos or Uranus. He was the father of Saturn.



7. Uranus is the only planet that is named after a Greek god. This curious fact has something to do with how Latin (which the Romans spoke) and Greek words were so closely interconnected in the minds of people during the Renaissance, when Uranus was discovered. It seems that Johann Bode, the German astronomer that settled on the name Uranus, may not have liked how the Latin name for the father of Saturn, Caelus, sounded. He may have preferred ‘Uranus’, and so that’s what this planet beyond Saturn came to be called.



8. A lot of other names had been rejected in the naming of Uranus. These included Hypercronius (which means ‘above Saturn’) and even the dreadful Georgium Sidus (meaning ‘The Georgian Planet’) with which Herschel wanted to flatter the then-King of England George III. Thankfully Herschel’s sycophantic attempts to name Uranus was not popular, or we wouldn’t have ‘your-anus’ in our midst anymore!



9. The tilt of Uranus may have been caused by a collision.



10. No planet other than Uranus has such a screwball way of spinning around the sun! The Earth, as we know, spins at an angle of 23 degrees. Jupiter is barely tilted at an angle of 3 degrees.



11. There’s a high chance that the reason for Uranus’s lopsided spinning is the many collisions it has suffered. If you look at near-infrared views of the planet, you’ll be able to see faint rings around the sphere. This will show you how deep the planet’s tilt angle really is. Something really big – many times bigger than the earth – may have crashed into Uranus a long time ago and thrown the planet on its side.



12. Experts believe that this tilt was the result, literally, of several punches to the planet and not just one big collision. This may have happened at the beginning of the solar system when the moons of Uranus were still balls of gas. Such a discovery has somewhat changed the way we think about the formation of planets in our solar system.



13. The old theory was that Uranus, Neptune, and the Saturn and Jupiter cores were created by pulling in small floating objects from space around it. But there is evidence to suggest that Uranus suffered a collision at least twice. This means that maybe planets can be created by impact too.



14. Uranus is icy and burning hot, with extreme seasons.



15. If you look in the direction of Uranus through a telescope, you will see a bluish-greenish disk. The planet’s color comes from the 2 percent methane gas in its atmosphere, along with mostly hydrogen (83 percent) and some Helium (15 percent). Methane makes it aquamarine or cyan in color.



16. In fact, Uranus has a thick, smoggy atmosphere that becomes denser the deeper you go. For example, if you were to fall off your spacecraft over Uranus, you’d probably find yourself half-falling and half-swimming through the planet’s atmosphere. In the heart of the icy smog of the planet is rock that is about the size of the earth.



17. The pressure on the surface is around 1.3 times that of the earth and the gravity is about 0.9 times that of Earth. In other words, a 10 feet dunk on Earth would equate to an 11 feet dunk on Uranus.



18. Temperatures are freezing -153 degrees C to -218 degrees C in the deeper troposphere where the clouds are. Compare with Earth temperatures, where the coldest it’s got in recent years was a record -93.2 degrees C in Antarctica in 2013.



19. Uranus has the coldest atmosphere in the solar system and it’s not hard to see why. It’s over 19 times further away from the sun than the Earth is! the temperature on the planet can get as low as -224 degrees Celsius.



20. The planet can get as hot as it gets cold. Where the sun’s radiation hits the planet’s outer atmosphere layers, temperatures can get as hot as 577 degrees C. The core may get as hot as 4,727 degrees (which is nothing to Jupiter’s 24,000 degrees C core). But the sun is far away from Uranus, so the furnace in the core of Uranus probably plays a much larger role in keeping the planet warm.



21. This kind of extreme temperature difference creates seasons as long as 20 years. This is easier to understand if you think about how large Uranus is.



22. Strong winds are a blowing.



23. Uranus is a giant planet. Wind speeds on giant planets can be as much as 15 times stronger than winds on Earth. Winds on Uranus can travel as fast as 560 miles per hour. That’s not exactly supersonic speed (the speed of sound in air is 750 miles per hour) so a stationary jet in the path of the crashing wind won’t experience a sonic boom like it would on Neptune. But the icy winds of Uranus can uproot trees, dislodge houses and do a lot more damage in seconds than we’ve seen on Earth.



24. It’s fun to know that the winds of Uranus only blow in very narrow layers that are a very small proportion of the planet’s atmosphere. What this means is, there’s probably not a lot of weather activity going on deeper into the giant planet of Uranus.



25. Uranus has 27 moons, Jupiter has 67 while the Earth has just one. Uranus has third most moons in the solar system. The last of these 27 moons was discovered in 2003.



26. There’s a lot more to learn about fascinating Uranus and its five major rocky moons: Miranda, Titania, Ariel, Umbriel, and Oberon.



27. Titania is the largest moon of Uranus. It is about 1/3rd the size of Earth’s moon.



28. The brightest of the Uranus’ moon is Ariel while the darkest is Umbriel.



29. The name of other moons of Uranus are: Trinculo, Puck, Cordelia, Setebos, Desdemona, Ophelia, Portia, Sycorax, Bianca, Cressida, Cupid, Belinda, Caliban, Rosalind, Stephano, Juliet, Mab, Perdita, Prospero, Ferdinand, Francisco and Margaret.



30. Wondering who suggested the names of these moons? Interestingly, the names of all the 27 moons of Uranus are taken up from the work of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.



31. There has been only one spacecraft to have visited the planet – the Voyager 2 on January 24, 1986. It’s to be hoped there will be a lot more!



32. Uranus and Neptune are classified as “ice giants” because of their different composition than that of Jupiter and Saturn, which mostly contain gas.



33. Uranus orbits the Sun every 84 Earth years.



34. While Uranus orbits around the Sun in 84 Earth years, the planet experiences 42 years of summer (sunlight) time and 4 years of winter (darkness) time.



35. The planet rotates at an average distance of approximately 2.9 billion km from the Sun. And the Earth is at a distance of 149,600,000 kilometers from the Sun. Neptune has the longest orbit of any known planet – 4.5 billion km from the Sun.



36. The intensity of sunlight on Uranus is 1/400 the intensity of sunlight on Earth.



37. Uranus is 14.5 times the mass of the Earth.



38. 1 astronomical unit, or 1 au, is the average distance from the Sun to the Earth. And Uranus is at a distance of 19.19 AU from the Sun (1 AU in KM = 149,598,000 kilometers.)



39. Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. Saturn is sixth and Neptune is eighth.



40. In 1789, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, the discoverer of Uranium, named the element after Uranus.



41. What amazes is the fact that Uranus does not generate any heat which is more than what it receives from the Sun. Neptune, however, which is almost similar in size of Uranus, emits 2.6 times the heat it receives from the Sun. Now, there are different theories that explain the inability of Uranus to emit the heat from its core.



42. Sunlight takes almost 2 hours and 40 minutes to reach Uranus, which is 20 times the time it takes.



43. Uranus has 13 rings, and all of them are very faint. The size of the bodies in the rings vary between 0.2 and 20 m in diameter. Saturn, on the other hand, has 12 rings that are the most extensive ring system of any planet of the solar system.



44. Uranus rotates on its side, it spins horizontally.



45. Uranus revolves in its orbit at a speed of 6.6 km/sec while Mercury is the fastest planet in this regard at 47.87 km/sec.



46. There is a difference in the density of Uranus and that of the Earth. So if you were weighed on Uranus, you would weigh only 0.89% of your actual weight on Earth.



47. One day on Uranus spans 17 hours and 54 minutes.



48. Earth’s axis is at a tilt of 23.5 degrees while Uranus’ axis is at a tilt of 98 degrees.



49. Uranus is also dubbed as the most boring planet in the solar system because of its quiet nature and lack of interesting data that can be gathered with telescopes.



50. Uranus is associated with the day “Wednesday.”



51. It is also the ruling sign of Zodiac “Aquarius.”



52. Modern astrologers consider Uranus as the primary native ruler of the eleventh house. The planet is thought to be associated with mental disorders, sympathetic nervous system, breakdowns and hysteria, spasms, and cramps.

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