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Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun.It is a gaseous cyan-coloured ice giant.Most of the planet is made of water, ammonia, and methane in a supercritical phase of matter, which astronomy calls "ice" or volatiles.
John Keats alludes to Herschel's discovery of Uranus in his 1816 sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken." Richard Holmes says that Keats "picks out the finding of Uranus, thirty-five years before, as one of the defining moments of the age." [113]
The exploration of Uranus has, to date, been through telescopes and a lone probe by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which made its closest approach to Uranus on January 24, 1986. Voyager 2 discovered 10 moons , studied the planet's cold atmosphere , and examined its ring system , discovering two new rings.
Uranus' ring system was the second to be discovered in the Solar System, after that of Saturn. [9] In 1982, on the fifth anniversary of the rings' discovery, Uranus along with the eight other planets recognized at the time (i.e. including Pluto ) aligned on the same side of the Sun. [ 10 ] [ 11 ]
Three-decade old data may have just led scientists to make a new discovery about Uranus.
Miranda, also designated Uranus V, is the smallest and innermost of Uranus's five round satellites. It was discovered by Gerard Kuiper on 16 February 1948 at McDonald Observatory in Texas, and named after Miranda from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. [9] Like the other large moons of Uranus, Miranda orbits close to its planet's ...
Oberon was discovered by William Herschel on January 11, 1787; on the same day, he discovered Uranus's largest moon, Titania. [1] [12] He later reported the discoveries of four more satellites, [13] although they were subsequently revealed as spurious. [14]
A year after Hershel's discovery, writes Popular Science, German astronomer Johann Bode suggested the winning name: Uranus, the Latin word for the Greek god of the sky: Ouranos (Ew-rah-nose ...