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The major moons of Uranus are airless bodies. For instance, Titania was shown to possess no atmosphere at a pressure larger than 10–20 nanobar. [42] The path of the Sun in the local sky over the course of a local day during Uranus's and its major moons' summer solstice is quite different from that seen on most other Solar System worlds.
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.
On the other side of Uranus's orbit, the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness. [74] Near the time of the equinoxes, the Sun faces the equator of Uranus, giving a period of day–night cycles similar to those seen on most of the other planets.
The moons of the trans-Neptunian objects (other than Charon) have not been included, because they appear to follow the normal situation for TNOs rather than the moons of Saturn and Uranus, and become solid at a larger size (900–1000 km diameter, rather than 400 km as for the moons of Saturn and Uranus).
Its unusual tilt makes Uranus appear to orbit the sun like a rolling ball. Uranus, which orbits almost 20 times further from the sun than Earth does, has 28 known moons and two sets of rings.
The sizes and masses of many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are fairly well known due to numerous observations and interactions of the Galileo and Cassini orbiters; however, many of the moons with a radius less than ~100 km, such as Jupiter's Himalia, have far less certain masses. [5]
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.
Oberon's surface is the most heavily cratered of all the Uranian moons, with a crater density approaching saturation—when the formation of new craters is balanced by destruction of old ones. This high number of craters indicates that Oberon has the most ancient surface among Uranus's moons. [35]