This planet is about 4 billion miles Pluto and as much as 1.6 billion miles from the earth. It's a beautiful pale blue fuzzy ball and very different from the other planets, it's strikingly blue and almost featureless that it seems surreal and almost like it has been created by some CGI graphic designer.
darkness.
**Uranus Tilted on its Axis and as seen by Voyager 2**
The cool bluish colour is as a result of Methane, the methane absorbs the red and orange wavelengths of the sun light that reaches it and reflects the blue and green and its soft appearance is due to something that us that live in big cities are very familiar with, Smog. In the outer planets there is methane that is natural gas, sunlight converts it to complex particles which forms a haze which is the reason those planets don't have a sharp but a fuzzy look to them.
Scientists speculate that Uranus and its Neighbour Neptune formed in roughly the same way, as the early proto planetary disk of gas and dust in our solar system settled, Jupiter and Saturn gathered up the most material and became the largest of the gas giants, as Jupiter and Saturn grew they destabilized the planetary system as a whole and dynamic interactions pushed Uranus and Neptune out to the edge of the solar system at an accelerated rate were they gathered icy and rocky objects. These icy materials have led some to call Uranus and Neptune the ice giants but they are not great balls of solid ice that an astronaut can walk across quite the contrary if an astronaut managed to get out there he will literary be flattened by the immense pressure before he gets a few 100 miles.
While the Gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have wild weather patterns, Uranus is rather calm in comparison, it is the only planet in our solar system doesn't have an internal heat source and is unique in this respect., Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune all have heat coming from deep within the planet which helps drive the circulation and this explains the banded structure of the clouds we see on those planets.
Uranus was discovered by Astronomer William Herschel in 1781, at the time the only known planets were the 6, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all of which were visible to the naked eye from earth, he first saw Uranus through a telescope and it was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope. Herschel being an armature astronomer, professional musician and an optometrist had the tools and knowledge to design the best telescopes in the world at the time.
**Replica of the telescope with which Herschel discovered Uranus with**
In 1977 NASA's Kuiper airborne observatory made another discovery about Uranus, out to watch the passing of the planet in front of a star but as Uranus closed in, the star winked several times as it neared the planet and several more times as it emerged on the other side, this winking or flickering was actually the star passing behind 5 planetary rings features only before seen on Saturn. More observation from the ground and also from the Voyager spacecraft confirmed the rings existence [ insert ring photo here], observations made from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005 found a 2nd set of rings orbiting twice and far away from the planet as the previously known rings. Uranus' rings are dim and thin made of dark dusty rocks and do not reflect as much sunlight as Saturn's thick icy rings. The rings were probably formed by the impact of a meteor or a comet with one of the planets 27 moons, the inner rings may be a result of collisions between the inner moons themselves, as the 13 inner moons swarm and dash around the planet at astonishing speeds orbiting the planet in at least a day and other in about 12 hours, compare this to our moon which takes 28 days to orbit a planet 4 times smaller is quite something. Moons like Cupid and Belinda are being watched by scientists as they are expected to collide in the near future, travelling just a few hundred miles apart and at unbelievable speeds they r expected to draw closer to each other due to gravitational forced and will eventually collide, this will be bad news for the moons but good news for the rings and the debris from the collision will add more material to the existing rings or form a new set of rings.
**Uranus and its Moons in orbit**
- It has a diameter oh 31,763 miles which is 4 times that of the earth
- It takes 84 earth years to orbit the sun
- I day on Uranus is 17.2 earth hours
darkness.
**Uranus Tilted on its Axis and as seen by Voyager 2**
The cool bluish colour is as a result of Methane, the methane absorbs the red and orange wavelengths of the sun light that reaches it and reflects the blue and green and its soft appearance is due to something that us that live in big cities are very familiar with, Smog. In the outer planets there is methane that is natural gas, sunlight converts it to complex particles which forms a haze which is the reason those planets don't have a sharp but a fuzzy look to them.
Scientists speculate that Uranus and its Neighbour Neptune formed in roughly the same way, as the early proto planetary disk of gas and dust in our solar system settled, Jupiter and Saturn gathered up the most material and became the largest of the gas giants, as Jupiter and Saturn grew they destabilized the planetary system as a whole and dynamic interactions pushed Uranus and Neptune out to the edge of the solar system at an accelerated rate were they gathered icy and rocky objects. These icy materials have led some to call Uranus and Neptune the ice giants but they are not great balls of solid ice that an astronaut can walk across quite the contrary if an astronaut managed to get out there he will literary be flattened by the immense pressure before he gets a few 100 miles.
While the Gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have wild weather patterns, Uranus is rather calm in comparison, it is the only planet in our solar system doesn't have an internal heat source and is unique in this respect., Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune all have heat coming from deep within the planet which helps drive the circulation and this explains the banded structure of the clouds we see on those planets.
Uranus was discovered by Astronomer William Herschel in 1781, at the time the only known planets were the 6, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn all of which were visible to the naked eye from earth, he first saw Uranus through a telescope and it was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope. Herschel being an armature astronomer, professional musician and an optometrist had the tools and knowledge to design the best telescopes in the world at the time.
**Replica of the telescope with which Herschel discovered Uranus with**
In 1977 NASA's Kuiper airborne observatory made another discovery about Uranus, out to watch the passing of the planet in front of a star but as Uranus closed in, the star winked several times as it neared the planet and several more times as it emerged on the other side, this winking or flickering was actually the star passing behind 5 planetary rings features only before seen on Saturn. More observation from the ground and also from the Voyager spacecraft confirmed the rings existence [ insert ring photo here], observations made from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005 found a 2nd set of rings orbiting twice and far away from the planet as the previously known rings. Uranus' rings are dim and thin made of dark dusty rocks and do not reflect as much sunlight as Saturn's thick icy rings. The rings were probably formed by the impact of a meteor or a comet with one of the planets 27 moons, the inner rings may be a result of collisions between the inner moons themselves, as the 13 inner moons swarm and dash around the planet at astonishing speeds orbiting the planet in at least a day and other in about 12 hours, compare this to our moon which takes 28 days to orbit a planet 4 times smaller is quite something. Moons like Cupid and Belinda are being watched by scientists as they are expected to collide in the near future, travelling just a few hundred miles apart and at unbelievable speeds they r expected to draw closer to each other due to gravitational forced and will eventually collide, this will be bad news for the moons but good news for the rings and the debris from the collision will add more material to the existing rings or form a new set of rings.
**Uranus and its Moons in orbit**
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