Saturday, February 7, 2015

Uranus

                                   Uranus 
     Uranus (lol) is the seventh planet from the sun. Like Saturn, it is shaped like an oval, but Uranus is tilted completely on its sides. It's like having humans lay down on the ground and then telling them to roll on their sides around and around. Uranus is considered an Ice Giant, but it has hydrogen and helium as its atmosphere just like the other two planets, Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus' atmosphere also has other substances like methane and hydrocarbon which is used as fuels on Earth. Unlike the other planets, Uranus does not have a molten, hot, lava mantle, but it has a mantle that has ice and rocks. This planet's core is also different from the other planets' because its core is made out of ice which is similar to its mantle. Uranus has the coldest atmosphere out of the eight planets, probably because of the different substances that its atmosphere contains of. Uranus has five thin rings made of rocks and dust particles.
     Uranus takes eighty-four Earth years to complete a whole rotation around the sun. Its tilt is about ninety-eight degrees. Because Uranus is rolling on its side, the pole at the end of the side that faces the sun, gets forty-two years of sunlight, while the other pole at the other side, gets forty-two years of complete darkness. Its distance from the sun is about 2.877 billion km. away from the sun. 
     Uranus was named after the Greek deity of the sky. Jupiter, the fifth planet, was named after Zeus. (In Roman mythology, Zeus is called Jupiter.) Then Saturn, the sixth planet, was named after Cronus, the father of Zeus. Now, the seventh planet was named Uranus, the father of Cronus and grandfather of Zeus. It's kind of weird about how the astronomers named these three planets. 

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