Uranus

Uranus, seventh planet in distance from the Sun and the least massive of the solar system’s four giant, or Jovian, planets, which also include Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. At its brightest, Uranus is just visible to the unaided eye as a blue-green point of light. It is designated by the symbol ♅.

Uranus is named for the personification of heaven and the son and husband of Gaea in Greek mythology. It was discovered in 1781 with the aid of a telescope, the first planet to be found that had not been recognized in prehistoric times. Uranus actually had been seen through the telescope several times over the previous century but dismissed as another star. Its mean distance from the Sun is nearly 2.9 billion km (1.8 billion miles), more than 19 times as far as is Earth, and it never approaches Earth more closely than about 2.7 billion km (1.7 billion miles). Its relatively low density (only about 1.3 times that of water) and large size (four times the radius of Earth) indicate that, like the other giant planets, Uranus is composed primarily of hydrogen, helium, water, and other volatile compounds; also like its kin, Uranus has no solid surface. Methane in the Uranian atmosphere absorbs the red wavelengths of sunlight, giving the planet its blue-green colour.

Most of the planets rotate on an axis that is more or less perpendicular to the plane of their respective orbits around the Sun. But Uranus’s axis lies almost parallel to its orbital plane, which means that the planet spins nearly on its side, its poles taking turns pointing toward the Sun as the planet travels in its orbit. In addition, the axis of the planet’s magnetic field is substantially tipped relative to the rotation axis and offset from the planet’s centre. Uranus has more than two dozen moons (natural satellites), five of which are relatively large, and a system of narrow rings.

Uranus has been visited by a spacecraft only once—by the U.S. Voyager 2 probe in 1986. Before then, astronomers had known little about the planet, since its distance from Earth makes the study of its visible surface difficult even with the most powerful telescopes available. Earth-based attempts to measure a property as basic as the planetary rotation period had produced widely differing values, ranging from 24 to 13 hours, until Voyager 2 finally established a 17.24-hour rotation period for the Uranian interior. Since Voyager’s encounter, advances in Earth-based observational technology have added to knowledge of the Uranian system.