What type of planet is Uranus?

Uranus, the tilting planet

In England, in 1781, an amateur astronomer named William Herschel looked through a homemade telescope he set up in his garden. He found a new planet, Uranus, which became the first planet to be discovered by using a telescope.

Uranus is the seventh planet from the sun. It is a blue-green planet nearly four times wider than Earth. Scientists believe that Uranus has a rocky core covered by a deep ocean and thick clouds of gas. Uranus has at least 27 moons and at least 13 rings.

When Earth spins around its imaginary line called an axis, it is tilted like a spinning top. But the axis of Uranus is tilted even more than that – more than any other planet. At times, Uranus’s North Pole is pointed almost straight toward the sun. About 42 Earth years later, it is pointed away from the sun. Scientists learned a lot about Uranus from Voyager 2, which flew past the planet in 1986.

Picture Credit : Google

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