The Planet Uranus

the farthest planet that we can see with the naked eye is Saturn but did you know that there are two more planets Beyond it these two are sometimes referred to as the ice giants and today we're going to talk about the first of them this is Cupa science Joe and I would like to talk more about Uranus we will cover its Discovery some information on its composition and makeup its size and distance away from us a along with some other fun stuff about this magnificent planet now until 1781 our solar system only had six known planets but on March 13th of that year this would change astronomer William herel observed a faint object in the constellation Gemini and noted that it was moving slowly when compared to the backround BR Stars he at first thought that it was a comet but later correctly identified it as a planet he wanted to name it after the monarch of his adopted United Kingdom yes this means we could have ended up with the planet George but astronomers decided that maybe that wasn't the best idea and wanted to maintain the tradition of naming planets after mythological figures and so the seventh planet became known as Uranus because of how far it is away from us for two centuries we really knew very little about it though five of its moons were discovered Tania and Oberon the two largest were also discovered by hersel in 1787 and later on other astronomers discovered three more moons umel and Ariel in 185 1 and Miranda in 1948 it would not be until 1977 just 6 months before the Voyager spacecraft left Earth that we discovered some rings around Uranus as well at that time five to be exact these were discovered by an occultation of a distant star so NASA's Kyper Airborne Observatory noticed that the Stars light dimmed as Uranus his Rings passed in front of it what really taught us a lot about Uranus though was the Voyager to flyby in 1986 now at this point you may start wondering what did we learn about Uranus from Voyager 2 it is worth noting that this probe was the first human-made object to fly by this planet continuing the trend of moon discovery Voyager discovered 10 more of them but I will spare you the names it also discovered the two outermost rings of the planet we now know that Uranus actually has 13 rings in total and 28 moons in total fory Dre 2 also taught us a bit about the wind speeds on the planet up to 450 mph in its atmosphere it even found evidence of a boiling ocean of water nearly 500 M below the tops of the cloud surface though I don't think we would expect to find anything living there the environment is simply not conducive to Life as We Know It Anyway with the temperatures pressures and materials likely being too extreme for anything to form and we will touch more on this later I mentioned earlier that Uranus was quite far away from the Earth with an average distance of about 1.8 billion miles or 19 astronomical units from this distance it takes sunlight 2 hours and 40 minutes to travel to Uranus from the Sun the diameter of the planet is 31,725 MI making it around four times wider than Earth to give an example if the Earth was the size of a nickel Uranus would be the size of a soft ball now a little known fact is that the larger planets spin more quickly than the smaller ones and for Uranus this is no exception for it one rotation takes just 17 hours and like Venus it also spins in the opposite direction as all the other planets because of how far away it is though its orbit around the Sun is much longer it takes around 84 earth years for it to make one such orbit Uranus has a very unique tilt as well pretty much being entirely on its side almost as if it is rolling its way around the Sun rather than being like a spinning top its tilt is 9777 de so again like almost completely tipped over we believe this may have been caused by a collision in the past with an earth-sized object that basically is what tipped it over this tilt causes Uranus to have the most extreme seasons in the solar system for nearly a quarter of each Uranian year The Sun Shines directly over each pole casting the other half of the planet into a 21e long dark winter talk about winter is coming I will also admit that that does not sound very enjoyable to me like I wouldn't want to be part of a 21-year winter I don't think I'd want to be part of a 21-year summer either though another potential result of the Collision that created his current axial tilt is the magnetosphere Urus also has an unusual irregularly shaped magnetosphere now typically magnetic fields are aligned with a planet's rotation like if we look at earth and its magnetic field we're going to see this but for Uranus its magnetic field is tipped over so like the planet is tipped over its magnetic field is tipped over it's really kind of sideways the axis is tilted nearly 60° from the planet's axis of rotation and it is also offset from the center of the planet by 1/3 of the planet radius because of this the auroras on Uranus are not in line with the poles like they are on earth Jupiter or Saturn now I'd mentioned this a little bit earlier but Uranus is one of the two ice giants in our solar system around 80% or more of the planet's mass is made up of a hot dense fluid of icy materials such as water methane and ammonia this icy material sits above a smaller Rocky core now near the core it heats up to around 9,000 de F which is which is hot and like its counterparts in the gas giants the ice giants don't have a true surface and it is mostly just swirling fluids kind of like what said when I talked about Jupiter this means that a spacecraft would not really be able to land there there'd be nowhere to go and we also would not be able to fly through it as the temperature and pressure would crush or vaporize us like we there's just no no chance that we get in there I have heard though that something particularly cool may occur on both Uranus and Neptune and that is that with these intense temperatur and pressures carbon within the planet may be crushed into diamonds and raining in the atmosphere too bad we will likely never be able to reach it to see but talk about a wild business idea let's travel to Uranus and farm diamonds from inside the planet I always find it fascinating that we are capable of learning about studying and in the case of our solar system visiting objects that are so far away from us and while I don't think there are any current or future missions planning to visit Uranus I am happy to say that we were able to visit it in the past I'm thinking that I will cover Neptune next as there is some fun stuff about it that I would like to share as well and if you would like to learn more maybe about the biggest planet in our solar system then check out this video right here or maybe it's right here one of these two sides otherwise I implore you to step outside tonight and look towards the Stars

Channel: Cuppa Science Joe

Views: 33

Keywords: Space, Astronomy, Science, Uranus, Planet, Solar System, NASA, Informative, Astronomer

Id: rNVtpXyEUSk

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2024