The widely accepted theory for how Uranus got knocked over is that a rogue Earth-size planet slammed into the ice giant billions of years ago. That lost world was mostly likely destroyed on impact.
Something icy and as massive as Earth, scientists say. Uranus likely got whacked by a body one to three times as massive as the modern Earth. The impactor that knocked Uranus on its side long ago isn't quite so mysterious anymore.
Notes: The sixth planet from the sun, Uranus appeared to pass directly behind Earth's moon, going out of sight for three and a half hours. The disappearing act is also known as the lunar occultation of Uranus.
Astronomers think they know how Uranus got flipped onto its side. According to detailed computer simulations, a body about twice the size of Earth slammed into Uranus between 3 to 4 billion years ago. The impact created an oddity in our Solar System: the only planet that rotates on its side.
Talk about a big bang. A "cataclysmic" collision some 4 billion years ago between Uranus and another massive object forever changed the evolution of the giant planet, a new study suggests.
Saturn is tilted after one of its moons crashed into it, a new study has suggested.
The conventional thinking holds that soon after the solar system formed, Uranus was knocked on its side by a series of collisions with some of the numerous planetesimals that swept through the region at that time.
Jan. 24, 1986: NASA's Voyager 2 made the first - and so far the only - visit to Uranus.
An artist's impression of a Neptune-like planet ejected from the solar system by Jupiter 4 billion years ago. Image credit: SwRI. It's like something out of an interplanetary chess game. Or maybe our solar system playground during recess.
It turns out that Uranus is so weird because of a massive collision billions of years ago. A new study confirms that this collision with a huge object — which was approximately twice the size of Earth — could have led to the planet's extreme tilt and other odd attributes.
But now there are serious attempts to visit this toxic gas giant, writes Richard Hollingham. The butt (snigger) of countless jokes, Uranus is almost certainly the most unloved planet in our solar system.
In Hesiod they are three giants, each with a hundred arms and fifty hands, sons of Uranus and Gaea. Their names are Briareus, Cottus, and Gyes. Owing to their hostile attitude to him, their father kept them imprisoned in the bowels of the earth.
Uranus hated his children and locked them away in Tartarus within the Earth. One of his sons, Cronus, overthrew Uranus with the help of his mother and castrated him removing his power. However, this act separated the heavens from the Earth and bore more children from Uranus' blood.
The researchers found that if Uranus once had a large enough moon, it would, within a few hundred million years, be capable of pulling the planet's tilt over 80 degrees.
Mars is known as the Red Planet because iron minerals in the Martian soil oxidize, or rust, causing the soil and atmosphere to look red.
At the other end of our solar system you have gas giant planets Uranus and Neptune. The latter, our most distant planet, is home to frozen methane clouds and the most violent winds in the solar system.
In 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoted the much-loved Pluto from its position as the ninth planet from the Sun to one of five “dwarf planets.” The IAU had likely not anticipated the widespread outrage that followed the change in the solar system's lineup.
The Fifth Giant was a planet orbiting between Saturn and Uranus. It was ejected by Jupiter and Saturn around 4 billion years ago.
Priplanus. Priplanus was the first planet that the Jupiter 2 crashed on in “Island in the Sky.” The Robinson family spent the rest of first season of the series on Priplanus. Will gives the name of the planet in “Return from Outer Space.” It had two moons and is an extremely small planet.
Uranus gets its blue-green color from methane gas in the atmosphere. Sunlight passes through the atmosphere and is reflected back out by Uranus' cloud tops. Methane gas absorbs the red portion of the light, resulting in a blue-green color.
Uranus is a ball of ice and gas, so you can't really say that it has a surface. If you tried to land a spacecraft on Uranus, it would just sink down through the upper atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, and into the liquid icy center.
Abstract. The rings of Uranus are oriented edge-on to Earth in 2007 for the first time since their 1977 discovery. This event provides a rare opportunity to observe their dark (unlit) side, where dense rings darken to near invisibility, but faint rings become much brighter.
One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the Sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 13 minutes to travel from the Sun to Mars.