What Are Some Fun Facts About The Planet Uranus?

Fun facts about Uranus:

It’s an unfortunate name Uranus.  If you haven’t thought about it lately, ask your son or daughter’s fifth grade teacher if you can sit in on their unit on the Solar System and you won’t be able to forget for weeks afterward just how unfortunate this planet’s name really is.

As English speakers, we cannot imagine anyone having the gall to name a planet Uranus, but, as luck would have it, it was not an English speaker who named the planet.  A British astronomer, who named the planet after King George the Third, first discovered the planet. Now, before you get too excited, he named Uranus Georgium Sidus, which means George’s Star.

Unfortunately, for English speakers, but perhaps fortunately for the rest of the world, the planet’s name changed after Herschel’s death.  The planet was renamed ‘Uranus’ by a German astronomer who actually had a very good reason for naming the planet what he did.

As you’ve probably noticed, the names in our Solar System come from Roman and Greek gods, and it was believed that King George’s Star should also be named after a God.  Quite rationally, the German astronomer decided to name Uranus as such because he thought the planet’s name should be ‘father of Saturn’ since the name Saturn means ‘father of Jupiter’.  So, quite cleverly, Uranus became what it is today, following this pattern of naming new planets.

Uranus has much more in common with Jupiter than it does with the Earth; it is covered with gases and even reflects an ethereal blue glow because the gases trap red light rays and reflect blue light waves.  It’s easy to imagine that Uranus has more in common with Jupiter than with Earth because it is so very far from Earth.

We all know that it takes the Earth one year to orbit around the sun; in comparison, it takes Uranus 82 years to orbit once around the sun.  Now that’s quite a difference!  Since it takes so long to orbit around the sun, seasons are each interminably long.  If you divide one year into four seasons, you get four seasons of approximately three months each, of course with some variation and of course with transitions between the seasons.  For Uranus, one season lasts just over 20 years!  You thought winter was long now—imagine if it were winter for 20 years.  The prospect, for those of us here on Earth, is a dumbfounding one.

Compared to our measly singular moon that inspires so much awe among humans, Uranus has 20 moons! Most of us can’t really imagine what it would be like to look for 20 different moons in the night sky; it’s got to be an impressive sight, but one that most humans will never get a chance to see. Fortunately, with modern photography and awesome telescopic powers, the real world is expanding beyond our Earth. All humans have numerous opportunities to see a genuinely vast amount of photography of Uranus, its moons, and everything beyond.

In its 82-year orbit around the sun, Uranus travels sideways. Many astronomers speculate that Uranus may have collided with a large celestial body at some point, which knocked the planet sideways for all eternity. This is a point of interest for many interested in planets and other things in our Solar System as on Earth everyone becomes more and more aware of the possibility of disasters in truly catastrophic proportions coming from outside the limits of our atmosphere. Many astronomers study Uranus as a means of fact collecting for Earth.

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