yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Uranus 101 | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

  • [Angeli] In ancient times, humans studied the night sky and discovered the worlds of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. But beyond this realm of knowledge, another world shined brightly, just waiting to be discovered.

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, from a distance of about 20 astronomical units, or 20 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Uranus orbits the star once every 84 Earth years, approximately the length of a human's entire life. This orbit causes each season of Uranus to last that much longer.

Theoretically, a human living on Uranus would experience the four seasons only once, but each for about 21 years. Partially due to its distance from the Sun, Uranus boasts the coldest temperatures in the solar system. These icy temperatures, dropping as low as negative 370 degrees Fahrenheit, are largely influenced by the planet's composition.

At about four Earths wide, Uranus has an Earth-sized core made of iron and magnesium silicate. The remainder, approximately 80% of Uranus, is a worldwide ocean of ices made of water, ammonia, and methane, the chemical behind the planet's cool blue color. This icy composition prevents Uranus from emitting much heat compared to other planets, making the blue world the solar system's coldest.

In addition to its extreme temperatures and orbit, Uranus has a dramatic orientation. While the other seven planets spin on their axes like tops, Uranus appears to roll along its equator. The planet is tilted at a near right angle, in which polar regions point toward and away from the Sun, rather than upward and downward.

This tilt, thought to be the result of Uranus' collision with at least one celestial body, has also affected the orientation of Uranus' 13 rings and 27 known moons. Unlike the rings and moons of other worlds, which orbit their home planets horizontally, those of Uranus orbit in a vertical orientation along the planet's tilted equator, much like a Ferris wheel.

Uranus and its many unusual features were a mystery to the ancients, and the planet was actually thought to be a star. But in the late 18th century, astronomer William Herschel discovered that the celestial object was actually a new world.

The scientific community debated over what the planet should be called, and eventually chose a name suggested by astronomer Johann Elert Bode. Bode believed that since Jupiter was the father of the gods, and Saturn was the father of Jupiter, then this new planet should be the father of Saturn, Caelus.

But rather than following the tradition of using names from ancient Roman religion, Bode instead opted for Caelus' ancient Greek equivalent, Ouranos. Ouranos, the ancient Greek god of the heavens, was then Latinized to be Uranus.

To this day, Uranus is still the only planet that veered from tradition with an ancient Greek namesake, a status most fitting for a planet beyond convention.

More Articles

View All
New Hampshire Summer Learning Series Session 5: Writing Coach
All right, good, great! Good morning, everyone. So welcome back to our summer learning series with KH Academy for New Hampshire Educators. Just a reminder that this is part of our summer learning path because we are working to enroll all of you into our p…
Creativity break: what types of science jobs involve creativity? | Khan Academy
[Music] All science careers involve creativity. Think about it; we’re asking and answering questions, and we’re solving the world’s problems. So, the more creatively we can solve the world’s problems, the more new ideas, concepts, and approaches we can u…
Prompting basics | Introducing Khanmigo | Khanmigo for students | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to see that you can have very different experiences with the same AI, and a lot of that is depending on how we prompt the AI. So before we even start doing some prompting ourselves or even understanding what that means, let’s ju…
Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's Complicated.
Climate change is just too much. There’s never any good news. Only graphs that get more and more red and angry. Almost every year breaks some horrible record, from the harshest heat waves to the most rapid glacier melt. It’s endless and relentless. We’ve…
Why India is a Rising Power
If you were to look at China and India, and those two countries specifically, um, and you were to handicap them, as you are uniquely qualified to do, maybe you could just broadly handicap India versus China for us. This is a topic we’ve been talking about…
Fishing Tips: How to Rig a Harpoon | Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks
[Applause] [Music] Captain TJ out of the Hot Tuna, and today I’m going to show you how we like to rig our harpoons and board the Hot Tuna. So what we have here is an 8ft scourge of the sea harpoon, our Lily dart on the end here. What I like to do is tak…