Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The radius of the Uranian Hill sphere is approximately 73 million km. [3] The relative sizes of moons are indicated by the size of their symbols, and the Caliban group of Uranian moons is labeled. Data as of February 2024. Uranus's irregular moons range in size from 120 to 200 km to under 10 km . [43]
Titania (/ t ə ˈ t ɑː n i ə, t ə ˈ t eɪ n i ə /), also designated Uranus III, is the largest moon of Uranus. At a diameter of 1,578 kilometres (981 mi) it is the eighth largest moon in the Solar System , with a surface area comparable to that of Australia .
For the small outer irregular moons of Uranus, such as Sycorax, which were not discovered by the Voyager 2 flyby, even different NASA web pages, such as the National Space Science Data Center [6] and JPL Solar System Dynamics, [5] give somewhat contradictory size and albedo estimates depending on which research paper is being cited.
Unlike most planetary moons, which are named from antiquity, all the moons of Uranus are named after characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope's work The Rape of the Lock. Neptune has 16 known moons ; the largest, Triton , accounts for more than 99.5 percent of all the mass orbiting the planet.
Oberon / ˈ oʊ b ər ɒ n /, also designated Uranus IV, is the outermost and second-largest major moon of the planet Uranus. It is the second-most massive of the Uranian moons , and the tenth-largest moon in the Solar System .
Miranda, also designated Uranus V, is the smallest and innermost of Uranus's five round satellites. It was discovered by Gerard Kuiper on 16 February 1948 at McDonald Observatory in Texas, and named after Miranda from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. [9] Like the other large moons of Uranus, Miranda orbits close to its planet's ...
The moons may have been caught in and then escaped from orbital resonance several times. They probably passed through the 3:1 resonance relatively recently, and currently are in or at least close to an 8:3 resonance. Namaka's orbit is strongly perturbed, with a current precession of about −6.5° per year. [87]
Ariel is the fourth-largest moon of Uranus. Ariel orbits and rotates in the equatorial plane of Uranus, which is almost perpendicular to the orbit of Uranus, so the moon has an extreme seasonal cycle. It was discovered on 24 October 1851 [11] by William Lassell and named for a character in two different pieces of literature.