All About Uranus

All About Uranus

By Madison Nef

Uranus cannot be seen from the Earth without a telescope- the seventh planet from the Sun, it was not known in ancient times; unlike the planets from Mercury to Saturn. Uranus was first seen by William Herschel in 1781 during a survey of the sky using a telescope. In 1782, George III appointed Herschel as Astronomer Royal due to this discovery.

William Herschel was born in Hanover, Germany.  He moved to England in 1757 in order to follow a career as a musician but after buying a book on astronomy he became interested only in watching the sky. Herschel ALSO discovered 2 of Uranus’ moons with a larger telescope; after its initial discovery.

Uranus has a total of 27 moons, most of which are named after characters in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. The five major moons are called Titania, Oberon, Miranda, Ariel and Umbriel. Umbriel is not from Shakespeare; but is the “melancholy sprite” in a poem by Alexander Pope.

Uranus is one of the “gas giants”, the four outer planets which are entirely composed of gas, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, it is the smallest of the four “giants”. Even so, is still several times larger than the Earth.  It has a diameter of 29297 miles, compared to the Earth’s diameter of just less than 8000 miles.

Getting back to the gas that Uranus is made of; most of the center of Uranus is a frozen mass of ammonia and methane, which gives it the blue-green color.  The atmosphere also contains small amounts of hydrogen and helium.

In 1977, Uranus passed in front of a star and astronomers observing the planet through giant telescopes saw nine rings around the planet.  These rings are very faint and not easily seen, unlike the rings around Saturn. Photographs, sent back by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980’s showed two more rings around the planet.

The Hubble Space telescope then found two more very faint rings, very distant from the planet, between 2003 and 2005, so we now know of a total of 13 rings. Scientists do not yet understand exactly what causes these rings, or exactly what they consist of.

Uranus orbits the Sun lying on its side; and takes 84 years to complete one orbit.  The Earth goes round the Sun in 365 days, one year. Because Uranus is lying on its side as it orbits the sun, for nearly an entire quarter of its orbit one pole of the planet is in complete darkness.

Uranus takes 17.9 hours to turn once on its own axis, faster than the Earth, which takes 24 hours and gives us the change from day to night. From the time when Uranus was first observed; scientists noticed that at certain points in Uranus’ orbit the planet was being pulled further out into space. In the 19th century, certain astronomers worked out that this must be because of the pull of gravity from another planet beyond Uranus. By making mathematical calculations based on the observations of Uranus, two astronomers Adams and Le Verrier identified where this other planet must be. The planet which was exerting a gravitational pull on Uranus was Neptune- considerably further out in space.

I hope you learned something about Uranus from this paper! I know I did. Who would have guessed that its moons were named after Shakespeare characters?

Anyway, I’ll leave this paper here.

Maddie