Uranus

[Joseph Buell]

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

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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).

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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).

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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.

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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.

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

Uranus cannot support life as we know it.

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

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

Source: NASA

[Joseph Buell]

Uranus has a moon named Juliet, but not one named Romeo.

[Charlotte Bridgestone]

Some more facts about Uranus: it became the first planet discovered with a telescope. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 using a telescope of his own design. After 2 years, it was found that this is a planet, and not a comet or star, as previously thought.
And the chemical element uranium was named after the planet Uranus. The discoverer of radioactive uranium, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, thus wanted to support the proposal of the astronomer Johann Bode to name the new planet "Uranium" instead of "George's Star", as the discoverer Herschel suggested to name it.

[Prometheus]

Uranus has a moon named Juliet, but not one named Romeo.

There is actually a crater called Romeo, on another moon of Uranus called Oberon.