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The researchers report that they were studying the planet's rings, which are collectively called Eta, and discovered that they had an oddly shaped orbit -- not round or even circular. Instead, they describe it as sort of triangular. More study showed that the odd orbit of the rings was due to gravitational pull from Cressida -- one of the planet's moons. The gravitational impact is exaggerated, they note, due to the moon keeping pace with the orbit of the planet. The particles in the ring, on the other hand, move faster than the moon. This results in the moon tugging...

The Uranus reversal begins a backward journey that will carry through early January 2021. Our surprises are about to get more baffling, random, disparate and mysterious. This is also very thrilling, as it provides the sort of work that requires making sense of the nonsense. Life is a puzzle, the solving of which will be extremely satisfying....

New orbital data on two moons of Uranus and two rings suggest the seventh planet may be a more chaotic place than thought. The two new moons, dubbed Cupid and Mab, were discovered in 2003 using the Hubble Space Telescope and archived images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then, the moons' discoverers, Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute and Jack Lissauer of NASA Ames Research Center, both in California, US, have refined the orbits of the moons and spotted two previously undetected dust rings. “To me, the exciting part of this discovery is the fact that there were these...