For the past week, we here at Gizmodo have been celebrating IRL Week: A series of stories dedicated to appreciating the remaining slice of our existence that is experienced offline. We’ve covered everything from how spray sunscreen is kind of terrible and the quiet joy of birdwatching to Airbnb horror stories and …
You might be aware of one of Uranus’ complexities: It spins on its side, and its moons orbit on that same rotated plane. New evidence strengthens the case that Uranus was smashed in a giant collision, resulting in its sideways orientation to its orbital plane and perhaps explaining some of the planet’s other mysteries.
I’m sick and tired of Uranus jokes. It’s time to get serious about Uranus, because there is some really serious science surrounding Uranus’s mysteries. And wow, is Uranus mysterious.
Here is an ice cube you do not want to put in your Diet Coke: A solid lattice of oxygen atoms with protons whizzing around inside of it. This ice is not normal on Earth, but might be elsewhere. And scientists have created it in a lab.
Uranus can’t seem to catch a break these days. Besides spinning on its side like the drunkard of the solar system and being the butt of everyone’s jokes, new research suggests several of its tiny moons will collide in a million years.
Move over Jupiter and Saturn, a crap load of diamonds could be found in two of the most mysterious places in the Solar System: Uranus and Neptune. Researchers using the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford have demonstrated in the lab— with one of the brightest sources of X-rays on the planet—that the depths of…
If David Lynch designed a planet, it would be Uranus. Much like every episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, Uranus is fiercely unique and weirdly endearing, even though it makes no fucking sense. The planet’s spin axis is 98 degrees, so it essentially rotates on its side—and while we have some idea as to what could have…
Uranus is the loneliest thing in the solar system. It hasn’t had contact with anyone in over 30 years, since NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft whizzed by it on January 24th, 1986. Thankfully, some good folks at NASA and elsewhere are advocating for missions to Uranus and its Ice Giant companion, Neptune, which could take…
Scientists have lots of questions about Uranus. Why does Uranus look the way it does, why did Uranus form the way it did, why does Uranus differ so much from other gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn? But I had a more important question.
Uranus is tired of being the butt of your jokes—especially that one.
After re-examining data acquired by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, astronomers have detected wavy patterns in two of Uranus’s dark system of rings—patterns that may be indicative of two undiscovered moons.
The official Twitter account for NASA’s Kepler, which surveys parts of the Milky Way Galaxy in search for hospitable planets, just got hacked. It’s unclear how or why the account was hacked, but it definitely tweeted a butt and a sketchy link.
There’s been dozens of probes that have gone out exploring the solar system since 1959's Luna 2 probe. PopChartLab has gone and noted down each one since in this beautiful poster of the Solar System.
On January 24th, 1986, Voyager 2 swept past our system’s seventh planet, Uranus, on its way through the solar system. It was the first and last time we visited the gas giant, and we found it’s one of the stranger locations in our solar system.
People like to make lists of things, especially lists of superlatives: the best, fastest, oldest, largest, heaviest and so on. There are lists of the ten fastest animals and the ten longest rivers and even of the ten highest-paid rock stars. The Guinness company created a small industry from publishing lists exactly…
Do names determine our destiny? Certainly, Uranus (properly pronounced, yur-an-us) makes a strong case for that theory. The planet has been repeatedly ignored by space missions, aside from a Voyager 2 flyby in 1986. But, a group of planetary scientists say Uranus has fascinating traits that merit investigation.
Just released by NASA's Cassini Imaging Team, the picture above shows Uranus as a tiny blue orb shining far beyond the bright hazy bands of Saturn's F ring.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has just captured another Pale Blue Dot image while orbiting Saturn. The difference is that, in this view, unlike the one from July 19, 2013, that featured Earth, the blue orb is Uranus, imaged by Cassini for the first time. So that tiny dot hanging out there in the blackness of space is…
Two-hundred-and-thirty-two years ago a mistake was made. The question is, do we have to keep living with it forever, or is it finally time to rename Uranus?
Almost fifty years after his death, Frank R. Paul remains one of the biggest names in science fiction art and pulp magazine illustration. These visions of life on moons and planets throughout our solar system (recently posted to reddit with no attribution to Paul, his work, or his impact) provide us with another…
