What Are Some Interesting Facts About Uranus?

If you are wondering what are some interesting facts about Uranus, then look no further.  Uranus is the only planet to be named after a Greek god rather than a Roman one.  Uranus was the Greek god of the sky, father of Cronus (Roman name Saturn) and grandfather of Zeus (Roman name Jupiter).  Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and it is the last planet from the Sun that can be seen without a telescope.

Here are some interesting facts about Uranus as a planet:

• Uranus is one of the four gas giants. The others are Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. 
• Neptune and Uranus are called ice giants because they are different from the other gas giants.  Their composition is mostly water, ammonia, and methane ice.
• The composition of Uranus is similar to Neptune’s with bluish green clouds of methane crystals in its atmosphere. 
• Lower in the atmosphere are clouds of water and ammonia ice crystals. 
• There may be an ocean of water with ammonia dissolved in it and the core of the planet is probably a rocky one. 
• The composition of the atmosphere is 83% hydrogen, 15% helium, 2% methane, and a small percentage of ethane and other gases. 
• Saturn is the least dense planet in the solar system and Uranus is the second least dense.

Orbit of Uranus

Here are some interesting facts about the orbit of Uranus. 

• Uranus is on average 1,784,860,000 miles from the Sun. 
• Its orbit takes 30,685 Earth days, which is a bit more than 84 years.
• A very interesting fact about the planet Uranus is that it tilts on its side.  To better explain, it leans so far over that its axis is level with its orbit.  Most planets have a tilt of less than 30 degrees.  Earth, for example, has a tilt of 23.5 degrees.  Uranus is tilted almost 98 degrees making it perpendicular to the ecliptic plane.  It is believed that this happened when a massive object struck Uranus when it was forming or soon after it formed. 
• The length of one day is around 17 hours but if you are on one of the poles, a day would last 42 years.  

Weather on Uranus

Here is an interesting fact about Uranus that remains unexplained:  It is the coldest planet in the solar system. 

• It is closer to the Sun than Neptune, but it is colder. 
• For some reason, Uranus does not have a very hot core that emits infrared radiation like other large planets. 
• It absorbs more heat than it gives off because something in the past caused its core to cool down. 
• The temperature in the atmosphere is around -355 degrees F.   

Rings and Moons

There are also some interesting facts about Uranus' rings and moons.

• The rings that surround Uranus are very different because they are dark.  They are also very narrow at only a few miles wide.  They are made of ice and rock and it is surmised that they are very young.

• Currently, 27 moons, or satellites, have been discovered around Uranus.
• The largest moon one is named Titania and its diameter is half the diameter of our moon.  Other moons in our solar system are named after Greek or Roman mythological characters, but most of the moons of Uranus are named after characters from the world of William Shakespeare.
• The two moons that are not named as such are Arlel and Umbriel.  They are the names of characters in the book The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope.  

Discovery of Uranus

Finally, the last set of interesting facts about Uranus has to do with its discovery:

• Uranus was discovered by William Herschel from Britain in 1781. 
• That fact about Uranus is a little surprising because, interestingly enough, it can be seen without a telescope. 
• In 1690, John Flamsteed thought it was a star in the constellation Taurus.  Herschel wanted to name the planet after King George but settled on Uranus.        

Most of what we know of Uranus came from Voyager 2 that flew within 50,000 miles of the tops of the clouds in January of 1986.  It took a multitude of pictures of it and its moons.  Currently, there are no plans to send another spacecraft to study it in the near future.