Uranus

Uranus is the 7th planet from the Sun in our Solar System it has the third-largest planetary in size and fourth-largest in mass.

Uranus has many rings, nine major, and many faint ones. Scientists in 1977, so far had identified 13 known rings around the planet.

The planet is approximately 32,000 miles in diameter, and is 14.5 the size of Earths mass. It is also 1.6 million miles from Earth.

The atmosphere consists of Hydrogen, helium and methane. The mantle consists of ammonia, water, and methane ice, with a iron silicone core.

William Herschel (1738-1822), a musician from Germany who settled in bath England, and became fascinated with astronomy, discovered Uranus, by accident in 1781.

In 1781 he was looking at the sky with his homemade telescope when he noticed a star that showed a small disk. The discovery earned Herschel royal recognition.

The name came from the Greek God, Saturn who was the father of Jupiter, and that the new planet should be named after the father of Saturn. In Latin the name of the Greek God of the sky is, Ouranos, which became Uranus

The 82 degree tilt of the axis means that its North Pole is pointing slightly south, and it also has a backward spin.

The strange tilt of Uranus may have been caused by a collision with a large body, soon after Uranus was formed. The effect causes each pole to spend about 40 years of constant summer daylight, and then another 40 in continuous winter darkness. The length of a year on Uranus lasts 84 Earth years.

Uranus has 27 moons each named after characters from the work of William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope; Ariel, Umbriel, Belinda, Titania, Oberon, Puck, Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Francisco, Ferdinand, Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Mab, Portia, Rosalind, Margaret, Perdita, and Cupid.