Free Republic

Scientists used to think that things were pretty chill over in the south hemisphere of Uranus. In fact, they thought it was one of the calmest regions of any of the gas giants. But in analyzing images taken nearly three decades ago by NASA's Voyager-2 spacecraft, researchers think they've found a kerfuffle of activity — which might indicate that there's something unusual about the planet's interior. If you look at these old photos of Uranus, the planet appears to be a stark, featureless ball. And even to scientists, who were able to identify more lively features of the gas giant,...

Revelation 6:14 Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. Everyone has seen pictures of the planet Saturn and its beautiful rings. Well, it is now known that many of our solar system's outer planets have rings. However, these rings are a problem for those astronomers who think that the universe is billions of years old. You see, the rings, which encircle the outer planets, would not be around today if the universe really was billions of years old. Recent studies of the rings of...

The planet Uranus reaches opposition on Saturday (Sept. 29). This means that Uranus is directly opposite the sun in the sky. Uranus rises will rise as the sun sets, and set as the sun rises. It will be highest in the sky at local midnight, roughly 1 a.m. if you are on Daylight Saving Time. Uranus was discovered accidentally by William Herschel on the night of March 13, 1781. All the other planets had been known since prehistoric times, so this was a major discovery in its time, and made Herschel famous.

For the first time, astronomers have snapped photos of auroras lighting up Uranus's icy atmosphere. Two fleeting, Earth-size auroral storms were imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope as they flared up on the dayside of the gas giant in November 2011. (See "Uranus Has a Bright New Spot, Picture Shows.") "The last time we had any definite signals of auroral activity on Uranus was when NASA's Voyager 2 probe swung by in 1986," said study leader Laurent Lamy, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris in Meudon, France. "But this is the first time we can actually see these emissions...

For the first time, scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant ice planet Uranus, finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is. Detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the newly witnessed Uranian light show consisted of short-lived, faint, glowing dots – a world of difference from the colorful curtains of light that often ring Earth's poles. In the new observations, which are the first to glimpse the Uranian aurora with an Earth-based telescope, the researchers detected the luminous spots twice on the dayside of Uranus – the...

Quit snickering! Something on Uranus has erupted and now scientists are all in a tizzy about what and why it might be.The news is exciting for a number of reasons. The simplest being we know very little about Uranus, mostly due to its incredible distance form Earth and because it's, well, frankly one of the more "boring" planets out there.But now, apparently, it's amazing again, all because of a mystery explosion in its atmosphere. Why is the explosion important? Mostly because Uranus's unique axis (on its side), amongst other things:"The reason we care about the clouds on the planet Uranus...

If Uranus was not tilted in one blow, as is commonly thought, but rather was bumped in at least two smaller collisions, there is a much higher probability of seeing its moons orbit in the direction we observe. By European Planetary Science Congress, AAS Division for Planetary Science — Uranus’ highly tilted axis makes it something of an oddball in our solar system. The accepted wisdom is that Uranus was knocked on its side by a single large impact, but new research rewrites our theories of how Uranus became so tilted and also solves fresh mysteries about the position and...

Proposed by British scientists as a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency, the mission would offer the first close-up view of Uranus in 25 years.British space scientists are leading plans to send a probe to explore giant ice planet Uranus. They have put forward a detailed proposal to the European Space Agency to launch a joint mission with NASA to the distant world, 1.8 billion miles from the sun. It would give scientists their first close-up views of Uranus since NASA’s Voyager 2 flew past and captured fleeting pictures 25 years ago. The £400million mission is designed...

Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics. The research, based on first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, found diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms floating atop liquid forms. The surprising revelation gives scientists a new understanding about diamonds and some of the most distant planets in our solar system..

Here is a trivia question: How many planets are visible without a telescope? Most will answer "five" (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Some might answer "six" and include the Earth in the mix. Six, in fact, is the correct number, but if you exclude our own world, there is indeed one other planet that can be spied without optical aid: the planet Uranus. This week will be a fine time to try and seek it out, especially since it is now favorably placed for viewing in our evening sky and the waxing moon is not overly bright. Of course,...

It’s that time of year on Uranus — time for the semiannual ring-plane crossing, when the planet’s ring system appears edge-on to observers on Earth. (Unlike the other planets, Uranus spins on its side, making for extreme changes in viewing angles.) The crossing allows telescopes to take pictures of the rings from the unlighted side, free from the glare that can obscure faint parts of them. Of course, a year on Uranus is equivalent to 84 Earth years, so this semiannual event is happening for the first time since the planet’s rings were discovered, in 1977. And it’s causing some...

The rings of Uranus are oriented edge-on to Earth in 2007 for the first time since their 1977 discovery. This provides a rare opportunity to observe their dark (unlit) side, where dense rings darken to near invisibility, but faint rings become much brighter. We present a ground-based infrared image of the unlit side of the rings that shows that the system has changed dramatically since previous views. A broad cloud of faint material permeates the system, but is not correlated with the well-known narrow rings or with the embedded dust belts imaged by Voyager. Although some differences can be explained...

Images of Uranus reveal for the first time a dark spot. During the past decade, many bright spots have been seen on Uranus, in both red and near-infrared filters. But this is the first dark spot ever seen on the planet. A team led by Lawrence Sromovsky of the University of Wisconsin and including Kathy Rages of the SETI Institute, Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute (Boulder, CO), and Patrick Fry of U. Wisconsin, observed the dark spot on Aug. 23 using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

Hubble spots dark spot on Uranus Updated Wed. Oct. 4 2006 4:27 PM ET Brian Jackson , DiscoveryChannel.ca The recently-troubled Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a giant swirling, dark vortex on Uranus. Peering 3.2 billion km into space, Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys snapped the photos on August 23. The dark spot indicates a massive storm on the alien planet's surface that is large enough to engulf two-thirds of the United States. University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers report the spot measures 1,700 km by 3,000 km. The image is a composite of three cameras that comprise Hubble's main viewing device. Hubble...

A tiny moon has been caught floating in front of Uranus for the first time, the Hubble Space Telescope reveals. The moon's shadow can also be seen on the planet's cloud tops, creating a solar eclipse on Uranus itself. Hubble imaged the event unexpectedly in July 2006, during a set of observations meant to study the planet's clouds. "When we first got this image back, we looked at it and said, 'What's that bright spot and that dark spot?'" says team member Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, US. "We thought, it must be a problem...

Astronomers knew there was something odd going on when they looked for Uranus' newly discovered outer rings. For starters, they could only find one. After months of analysis, they figured out why: Unlike its red partner, the missing ring is so blue, it fell outside the telescope's range. "It's funny that this research got started by something we didn't see," said Imke de Pater, with the University of California at Berkeley and lead author of a paper describing the discovery in this week's journal Science. The initial discovery of a pair of outer rings circling Uranus was made by astronomers...

Astronomers have discovered that the planet Uranus has a blue ring - only the second found in the Solar System. Like the blue ring of Saturn, it probably owes its existence to an accompanying small moon. Scientists suspect subtle forces acting on dust in the rings allow smaller particles to persist while larger ones are recaptured by the moon. Smaller particles reflect blue light, giving the ring its distinctive colour, the US team reports in Science. All other rings - those around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune - are made up of both large and small particles, making the...

Two outer rings, one red the other blue, have been observed around the distant planet Uranus. While Uranus had been known to have inner rings of neutral color, the newly discovered outer rings show color contrasts that researchers think are caused by light reflected off particles that differ in size from one ring to the other. And the outermost ring is only the second blue ring to have been observed, a team led by Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, reports in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Also blue is Saturn's outermost ring, the researchers said....

The Second Ring-Moon System of Uranus: Discovery and Dynamics Mark R. Showalter1* and Jack J. Lissauer2 Deep exposures of Uranus taken with the Hubble Space Telescope reveal two small moons and two faint rings. All of them orbit outside of Uranus's previously known (main) ring system but are interior to the large, classical moons. The outer new moon, U XXVI Mab, orbits at roughly twice the radius of the main rings and shares its orbit with a dust ring. The second moon, U XXVII Cupid, orbits just interior to the satellite Belinda. A second ring falls between the orbits of...

Hubble discovers new rings and moons around Uranus Washington: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new pair of rings around Uranus and two new small satellites orbiting the planet. The rings are very far away from the planet and the largest of them is twice the diameter of the planet's previously known rings. Astronomers are now calling them Uranus' second ring system. Also one of the new moons shares its orbit with one of the rings. The findings are to be published in the journal Science. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, program scientist for Hubble at NASA Headquarters said that analysis...