Uranus is an ice giant. Most of its mass is a hot, dense fluid of "icy" materials — water, methane and ammonia — above a small rocky core. Uranus has an atmosphere made mostly of molecular hydrogen and atomic helium, with a small amount of methane.
Uranus has 27 known moons, and they are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Uranus has 13 known rings. The inner rings are narrow and dark and the outer rings are brightly colored. Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to fly by Uranus. No spacecraft has orbited this distant planet to study it at length and up close.
Like Venus, Uranus rotates east to west. But Uranus is unique in that it rotates on its side. Uranus is the "butt" of more than a few jokes and witty and not so witty puns, but it's also a frequent destination in various fictional stories, such as the video game Mass Effect and TV shows like "Doctor Who.
Uranus is made of water, methane, and ammonia fluids above a small rocky center. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium like Jupiter and Saturn, but it also has methane. The methane makes Uranus blue. Uranus also has faint rings. The inner rings are narrow and dark. The outer rings are brightly colored and easier to see. But closer to the poles, winds shift to a prograde direction, flowing with Uranus' rotation. Uranus has an unusual, irregularly shaped magnetosphere.
Magnetic fields are typically in alignment with a planet's rotation, but Uranus' magnetic field is tipped over: the magnetic axis is tilted nearly 60 degrees from the planet's axis of rotation, and is also offset from the center of the planet by one-third of the planet's radius. Auroras on Uranus are not in line with the poles like they are on Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn due to the lopsided magnetic field. The magnetosphere tail behind Uranus opposite the Sun extends into space for millions of miles.
Introduction The seventh planet from the Sun with the third largest diameter in our solar system, Uranus is very cold and windy. Potential for Life Potential for Life Uranus' environment is not conducive to life as we know it. Size and Distance Size and Distance With a radius of 15, Orbit and Rotation Orbit and Rotation One day on Uranus takes about 17 hours the time it takes for Uranus to rotate or spin once. Moons Moons Uranus has 27 known moons.
Rings Rings Uranus has two sets of rings. Formation Formation Uranus took shape when the rest of the solar system formed about 4. Structure Structure Uranus is one of two ice giants in the outer solar system the other is Neptune.
A 3D model of Uranus. JPL's lucky peanuts are an unofficial tradition at big mission events. Full Moon Guide: October - November A new paper details how the hydrological cycle of the now-dry lake at Jezero Crater is more complicated than originally thought.
The lander cleared enough dust from one solar panel to keep its seismometer on through the summer, allowing scientists to study three big quakes. This year, the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to 1. Researchers will use Webb to observe 17 actively forming planetary systems. Scientists found evidence that an area on Mars called Arabia Terra had thousands of "super eruptions" over a million-year period. Perseverance successfully collected its first pair of rock samples, and scientists already are gaining new insights into the region.
Data received late Sept. The rover will abrade a rock this week, allowing scientists and engineers to decide whether that target would withstand its powerful drill. Drought is a complicated problem that requires lots of data. Satellites from NASA and its partners help collect that data. And unlike Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune, which have horizontal sets of rings around them, Uranus has vertical rings and moons that orbit around its tilted equator.
The ice giant also has a surprisingly cold temperature and a messy and off-centre magnetic field, unlike the neat bar-magnet shape of most other planets like Earth or Jupiter. Scientists therefore suspect that Uranus was once similar to the other planets in the solar system but was suddenly flipped over. So what happened?
Our new research, published in the Astrophysical Journal and presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, offers a clue. Our solar system used to be a much more violent place, with protoplanets bodies developing to become planets colliding in violent giant impacts that helped create the worlds we see today. We set out to uncover how it could have happened. Instead, we ran computer models simulating the events using a powerful supercomputer as the next best thing.
The basic idea was to model the colliding planets with millions of particles in the computer, each representing a lump of planetary material. We give the simulation the equations that describe how physics like gravity and material pressure work, so it can calculate how the particles evolve with time as they crash into each other. This way we can study even the fantastically complicated and messy results of a giant impact. Another benefit of using computer simulations is that we have full control.
We can test a wide variety of different impact scenarios and explore the range of possible outcomes. Our simulations see above show that a body at least twice as massive as the Earth could readily create the strange spin Uranus has today by slamming into and merging with a young planet. This could inhibit the mixing of material inside Uranus, trapping the heat from its formation deep inside.
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