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Herschel introduced but did not create the word "asteroid", [88] meaning star-like (from the Greek asteroeides, aster "star" + -eidos "form, shape"), in 1802 (shortly after Olbers discovered the second minor planet, 2 Pallas, in late March), to describe the star-like appearance of the small moons of the giant planets and of the minor planets ...
It is the second-most massive of the Uranian moons, and the tenth-largest moon in the Solar System. Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, Oberon is named after the mythical king of the fairies who appears as a character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Its orbit lies partially outside Uranus's magnetosphere.
Uranus's irregular moons have elliptical and strongly inclined (mostly retrograde) orbits at large distances from the planet. [3] William Herschel discovered the first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787. The other three ellipsoidal moons were discovered in 1851 by William Lassell (Ariel and Umbriel) and in 1948 by Gerard Kuiper . [1]
Uranus is visible to the naked eye, but it is very dim and was not classified as a planet until 1781, when it was first observed by William Herschel. About seven decades after its discovery, consensus was reached that the planet be named after the Greek god Uranus (Ouranos), one of the Greek primordial deities.
The name Titania was taken from the Queen of the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream. [15] The names of all four satellites of Uranus then known were suggested by Herschel's son John in 1852, at the request of William Lassell, [16] who had discovered the other two moons, Ariel and Umbriel, the year before. [17]
"all of which are named after various characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope." "William Herschel discovered the first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787, while the remaining spherical moons were discovered in 1851 by William Lassell (Ariel and Umbriel) and in 1948 by Gerard Kuiper (Miranda)." "while"-->and.
Similarly, the fourth satellite of Pluto, Kerberos, discovered after Pluto was categorized as a dwarf planet and assigned a minor planet number, was designated S/2011 (134340) 1 rather than S/2011 P 1, [29] though the New Horizons team, who maintained that dwarf planets were planets, used the latter.
Counting them among the planets became increasingly cumbersome. Eventually, they were dropped from the planet list (as first suggested by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1850s) and Herschel's coinage, "asteroids", gradually came into common use. [140] Since then, the region they occupy between Mars and Jupiter is known as the asteroid belt.