Uranus

Uranus

Uranus—seventh planet from the Sun—rotates at a nearly 90-degree angle from the plane of its orbit. This unique tilt makes Uranus appear to spin on its side.

10 Need-to-Know Things About Uranus

  • HUGE

    Uranus is about four times wider than Earth. If Earth were a large apple, Uranus would be the size of a basketball.

  • SEVENTH WANDERER

    Uranus orbits our Sun, a star, and is the seventh planet from the Sun at a distance of about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers).

  • SHORT-ISH DAY, LONGISH YEAR

    Uranus takes about 17 hours to rotate once (a Uranian day), and about 84 Earth years to complete an orbit of the Sun (a Uranian year).

  • ICE GIANT

    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.

  • GASSY

    Uranus has an atmosphere made mostly of molecular hydrogen and atomic helium, with a small amount of methane.

  • MANY MOONS

    Uranus has 27 known moons, and they are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

  • THE OTHER RINGED WORLD

    Uranus has 13 known rings. The inner rings are narrow and dark and the outer rings are brightly colored.

  • A BIT LONELY

    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.

  • LIFELESS

    Uranus cannot support life as we know it.

  • ONE COOL FACT

    Like Venus, Uranus rotates east to west. But Uranus is unique in that it rotates on its side.

Exploration

Huble Telescope Only one spacecraft has visited distant Uranus. After traveling more than 1.8 billion miles (3 billion kilometers) in nine years, NASA's Voyager 2 gathered much of its critical information about the mysterious planet, including its rings and moons, in just six hours.

The rest of what we know about Uranus comes from observations via the Hubble Space Telescope and several powerful ground-based telescopes.