Ura Sli

Ten Things to Know About Uranus

1: HUGE

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

2: 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).

3: 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).

4: 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.

5: GASSY

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

6: MANY MOONS

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

7: THE OTHER RINGED WORLD

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

8: 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.

9: LIFELESS

Uranus cannot support life as we know it.

10: ONE COOL FACT

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