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The intensity of sunlight varies inversely with the square of the distance—on Uranus (at about 20 times the distance from the Sun compared to Earth), it is about 1/400 the intensity of light on Earth. [71] The orbital elements of Uranus were first calculated in 1783 by Pierre-Simon Laplace. [72]
Uranus V Uranus I Uranus II Uranus III Uranus IV Neptune I Pluto I Symbol SVI SVIII UV UI UII UIII UIV NI PI Discovery year 1655 1671 1948 1851 1851 1787 1787 1846 1978 Mean distance from primary km 1,221,870 3,560,820 129,390 190,900 266,000 436,300 583,519 354,759 17,536 Mean radius: km :E: 2,576 0.404 735.60 0.115 235.8 0.037 578.9 0.091 584.7
The astronomical unit (symbol: au[1][2][3][4] or AU) is a unit of length defined to be exactly equal to 149,597,870,700 m. [5] Historically, the astronomical unit was conceived as the average Earth-Sun distance (the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion), before its modern redefinition in 2012. The astronomical unit is used primarily for ...
Uranus, blue-green in color due to the methane contained in an atmosphere comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium, has a diameter of about 31,500 miles (50,700 km). It is big enough to fit 63 ...
Careful observations of the 1769 transit of Venus allowed astronomers to calculate the average Earth–Sun distance as 93,726,900 miles (150,838,800 km), only 0.8% greater than the modern value. [291] Uranus, having occasionally been observed since 1690 and possibly from antiquity, was recognized to be a planet orbiting beyond Saturn by 1783. [292]
Uranus was shown to have a magnetic field that was misaligned with its rotational axis, unlike other planets that had been visited to that point, [50] [53] and a helix-shaped magnetic tail stretching 10 million kilometers (6 million miles) away from the Sun. [50] When Voyager 2 visited Uranus, much of its cloud features were hidden by a layer ...
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19] Small Solar System objects are classified by their orbits: [20] [21]
One particularly distant body is 90377 Sedna, which was discovered in November 2003.It has an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it to an aphelion of 937 AU. [2] It takes over 10,000 years to orbit, and during the next 50 years it will slowly move closer to the Sun as it comes to perihelion at a distance of 76 AU from the Sun. [3] Sedna is the largest known sednoid, a class of objects that ...