It’s been awhile between innings, but it’s back! The worst tour in the Solar System, about the Solar System has returned, with another well-intended love letter towards the topic. The tension is almost unbearable, but you must wait a little longer before the magic begins anew.
For those silly sausages that have missed the previous entries, fear not, for I have a list:
1.) Meet the Family
2.) The Sun
4.) Mercury
5.) Venus
7.) The Moon
8.) Mars
10.) Ceres
11.) Jupiter
12.) The Galilean moons
13.) Saturn
14.) Titan
15.) The Moons of Saturn
Believe it or not, not everybody appreciates the amount of effort and time it takes to create a masterpiece of scientific communication.
Take The New Zealand Sour Cream and Chives Preservation Society for an example; no please, take them. In commenting on my blog about The Moons of Saturn in a media statement, The New Zealand Sour Cream and Chives Preservation Society said:
“Six moons. This terrible excuse of a New Zealander forced us to read and learn about six different moons of Saturn. Hey moron, news flash, people don’t care about stuff like this. We already have a moon! When is this human skidmark going to get a hint and stop with this crap?! The hardworking and honest people of New Zealand are getting tired of this vacuous human hedgehog telling us things, we don’t want to know. Someone call a taxi for him and take him home.”
I think I’m beginning to get under their skin. Good times.
After visiting the Moons of Saturn, the next stop on the tour is every 10-year-old’s favourite joke and planet: Uranus! Ladies and gentlemen, please make sure your seat is forward and tray tables are in their full upright position. Make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and all carry-on luggage is stowed underneath the seat in front of you or the overhead bins, because we’re going to Uranus!
Let’s start the lecture with Uranus’ name. The most common way to pronounce it is:
Yuor-ray-nuhs or U-ran-us
It’s been the butt1 of jokes for years, in every school around the world. However, if you want to sound like a true geek or nerd, then have to pronounce it as:
Yoor-e-nes or Ur-an-us
Trust me, it’s for the best.
Uranus is a planet that’s overshadowed by Jupiter’s size and Saturn’s rings, like two overachieving older siblings. It’s an odd world, but that just makes it even better.
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun and the third largest planet in the Solar System. It’s also the third Gas Giant or Outer Planet, as well as being about 4.5 billion years old, which puts it slightly older than some of my running t-shirts.
The name Uranus does come not from some graffiti on a public toilet wall, but from somewhere else. Usually, the answer to this question would be Roman mythology. I mean, as the tour has progressed, we’ve met Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; all named from Roman mythology.
But Uranus is different because its name comes from Greek mythology. Uranus or Caelus in Roman mythology, was the father of Cronus (Saturn), and grandfather to Zeus (Jupiter), as well as being the great-grandfather of Ares (Mars).
Unlike the other planets we have met on the tour, Uranus was the first planet to be discovered by mathematical prediction and telescope. I told you Uranus was odd, but it’s still cool. Throughout history, people have been able to see Uranus with the naked eye, but assumed it was a star.
To my understanding, the German astronomer Johann Elert Bode, predicted Uranus’ existence after making some observations but also made the mistake of thinking it was a star. However, that changed on 13th March 1781, when William Herschel (Frederick William Herschel) discovered it with his homemade reflecting telescope.
Herschel initially thought it could have been a comet, but more astronomers started to observe it. Upon greater reflection, this wandering light was deemed to be a planet in 1783. Because Herschel discovered it, he claimed dibs on the name and suggested Georgium Sidus or George’s Star, after his patron, King George III. This did not prove to be successful.
It was Bode, who in 1782, floated the name, Uranus, taken from the pages of Greek mythology. It was a hard sell, but eventually, Uranus was decided a better name than Georgium Sidus. It wasn’t until 1850, when the last supporters of Georgium Sidus, the HM Nautical Almanac Office, finally caved, and started referring to it as Uranus.
Since it’s a gas giant and the third largest planet in the Solar System, Uranus is larger than Earth. Uranus has a diameter of 51,118 km, which means Uranus could fit about 63 Earths inside it.
Can you imagine your doctor explaining the reason you feel crap, is because you have 63 Earth-sized planets inside you? I’d rather not imagine the condition of the toilet.
Uranus and its happy siblings all orbit the Sun. And just like the others, Uranus has an elliptical orbit, so at its perihelion, the distance from Uranus from the Sun is about 2.5 billion km; and at its aphelion is 3 billion km, with 6.80 km/s being the average orbital speed. It takes sunlight roughly, 2 hours and 40 minutes to travel from the Sun to Uranus, which is the length of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
With its rotation and axial tilt…well, remember that I said Uranus is odd? I wasn’t lying. One day on Uranus takes about 17 hours, which is the length it takes for Uranus to complete one rotation on its axis. If you thought one Uranian day was short, its year is next level.
It takes Uranus 84 Earth years to complete one orbit of the Sun. 84 years! Let that sink in. The last time Uranus was roughly in its present location in time and space – at the time of this blog being published – the Second World War was raging across the world. The Battle of Britain was being fought, the Hundred Regiments Offensive was starting, The Blitz was just around the corner, and Bugs Bunny had just made his official debut.
Most of the planets in the Solar System rotate East to West, with Venus having a retrograde orbit, so it spins West to East. Uranus is watching this and says, “Hold my beer.” Uranus doesn’t rotate East to West, but even though technically, Uranus has a retrograde orbit, it’s not the same as Venus.
Uranus’ equator is almost at a right angle, relative to its orbit, with a tilt of 97.77 degrees. Imagine Saturn with its beautiful rings, rotating parallel to the Solar System’s plane, like it does now. Now imagine that someone pushes the planet over, so its rings are not horizontal, but vertical. That’s Uranus!
Scientists believe that deep into Uranus’ past, another object must have collided with it, with enough force and energy, to knock the planet over, and start spinning it in the most asinine way possible. Because of this outrageous tilt, Uranus has the most extreme seasons in our family of planets. Each of Uranus’ poles gets about 42 years of darkness, then 42 years of sunlight, and back again.
Can you imagine 42 years of winter? Not even House Stark or the North could imagine that horror. For comparison, Earth’s tilt is only 23.5 degrees.
This brings us to Uranus’ temperatures, because this charming little oddball, is the coldest planet in our family. Yes, even though Uranus is over 2 billion km away from the Sun, it’s the crazy arse tilt that allows it to take the crown. Temperatures on Uranus have been recorded at -224℃, which is colder than my bathroom in winter.
Added to the fact that Uranus’ atmosphere has a mixture of hydrogen, helium, methane, hydrogen deuteride, hydrogen sulfide, methane hydrate, ammonia, water ice, and ammonium hydrosulfide, reinforces the concept that because Uranus is a gas giant, it is also an ice planet. Compared to Uranus, Hoth is a tropical destination.
I’m running out of time, but there’s so much more to discuss about Uranus, but the two most important things left are its rings and moons. There are only four ringed planets in the Solar System; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Like Saturn, Uranus’ rings can be divided into groups. It has 13 rings, with the first nine being narrow inner rings, then two dusty-like rings, and then two outer rings. Because scientists are amazing at naming cosmic objects, the rings moving away from Uranus are: Zeta, 6, 5, 4, Alpha, Beta, Eta, Gamma, Delta, Lambda, Epsilon, Nu, and Mu. This awards Uranus the honour of having the second most complex ring system in the Solar System.
As for its moons, Uranus has 28 confirmed moons. And to continue the notion of Uranus being odd, the names of its moons are not derived from Roman or Greek mythology like other moons, but rather characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
I’ll talk more about Uranus’ moons next time on the tour, because they deserve their own blog post. I wanted to write more about our strange older sibling, but I’ve been watching too much of the Olympics, sorry.
And with that, this week’s lecture is over. What is your favourite fact about Uranus? As always, please let me know. I still hope you’re enjoying the Tour. I know the view is terrible, but at least the ticket is free!
Thanks again for reading, following, and subscribing to Some Geek Told Me. I’m still on Twitter and Mastodon, trying to sound less of a geek, but utterly failing. Drop in and say hello, if you feel like it.
Please don’t forget to walk your dog, read a banned book, keep pressuring your politicians for a ceasefire in Palestine, and I’ll see you next week.
Slava Ukraini!
1 Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
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