THE PLANET URANUS – My wife is a little astonished that I picked such a bland title for this months dip into astronomy with so many possibilities for digging up bad old schoolboy jokes. I resisted all those temptations so I will proceed to explain why Uranus is such a weird and foreboding place.
I should start with where the name comes from, it’s ancient Greek and refers to one of the earliest gods. Although Greek deities all seem a bit weird to us in the 21st century, Uranus was in a league of his own, he was both son and husband to Gaia the Earth goddess and fathered the 12 Titans. One of them, Cronus later castrated Uranus and after that things went downhill a bit. As this is astronomy not mythology I’ll just add that Uranus was the god of the heavens which is why we use his name.
I’ve heard many different pronunciations over the years, mostly by people trying to be polite and not mention bums so here is the correct way, although hardly anyone uses it. Uranus is Greek so pronounce it in ancient Greek, ‘Ouranos’ that’s oo-ran-nohs.
That’s quite enough of that, so now for the planet Urnaus itself. It’s the seventh planet from the Sun and a really long way out, only the planet Neptune is further away. It’s a gigantic ball of mostly methane, ammonia and water with a soupçon of other noxious substances. Through a telescope it’s a barely discernible blueish dot that I first saw when I was 19 years old, and was so unimpressed that it was 50 years before I bothered again. Probably the main reason an amateur will look for it is to know that they’ve seen all the planets for themselves, and that is an excellent reason. If you want to try for yourself it will be best to wait until later in the year as it’s not easily visible to us at the moment. In the first week of September Uranus will be just below the famous Pleiades star cluster.
If the planet Uranus is so boring to look at what makes it so special? All the planets circle around the Sun in the same plane, meaning it’s as though they are sitting on a gigantic disk. Each planet spins on its axis, Earth takes one year to do that but all the planets take different times. The axis of each planet is tilted over compared with its orbit, Earth by about 23 degrees (this is why we have seasons) Mars by 25 degrees, Mercury hardly at all, but Uranus is completely different, it’s tilted by a whopping 98 degrees, effectively it’s flying through space lying on its side.
What can have happened to Uranus to make this happen? We’re pretty certain that billions of years ago, probably not long after it was formed, Uranus was hit by another planet similar in size to Earth and the collision knocked it over. It’s also likely that a lot of the debris from the impact slowly coalesced together and became Uranus’s moons.
I’ll finish with a little fun fact, these moons are mostly named after characters in Shakespearian plays instead of those weird Greek gods. So, if anyone tells you that this planet is boring now you’ll know which part of their anatomy they’re talking from!
Charles Oates, Vega Baja Astronomy Group.
● To find out more about observing and astronomy why not join our group, email us at vegabaja.astronomygroup@gmail.com to find out more.
