Uranus was discovered by the English astronomer William Herschel, who had undertaken a survey of all stars down to eighth magnitude—i.e., those about five times fainter than stars visible to the naked eye. On March 13, 1781, he found “a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet,” distinguished from the stars by its clearly visible disk. Its lack of any trace of a tail and its slow motion led within months to the conclusion that the object was a planet, rather than a comet, moving in a nearly circular orbit well beyond Saturn. Observations of the new planet during the next 65 years revealed discrepancies in its orbital motion—evidence of gravitational forces on Uranus that were not due to any other known planet, which ultimately led to the discovery of yet more distant Neptune in 1846.

Herschel suggested naming his new discovery Georgium Sidus (Latin: “Georgian Star”), but Herschel and others called it the “Georgian Planet”—in honour of his patron, King George III of England—while the French favoured the name Herschel. The planet was eventually named according to the tradition of naming planets for the gods of Greek and Roman mythology; Uranus is the father of Saturn, who is in turn the father of Jupiter.

The orbit of Uranus seemed to fit the prediction of a simple empirical rule, Bode’s law, that had been devised in 1766 and popularized in 1772 to explain the orbital distances from the Sun of Earth and the five planets known to the ancients. In addition, where the law predicted another planet between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroids seemed to fill the gap, beginning with the discovery of the largest asteroid, Ceres, in 1801. For about three-quarters of a century, these successes overcame doubts stemming from the facts that the law had no theoretical basis and that it provided only an approximate fit to the planetary orbits. Neptune turned out to not fit the pattern at all (being 21 percent closer to the Sun than the law predicted), nor did Pluto, and now Bode’s law is of only historical significance.

After his discovery of Uranus, Herschel continued to observe it with larger and better telescopes and eventually discovered its two largest moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787. (Herschel claimed to have discovered four more moons in the 1790s, but his reputation was so esteemed that the nonexistence of those moons was not realized until the mid-19th century despite the almost total lack of corroboration by other astronomers.) Two more major moons, Ariel and Umbriel, were discovered by the English astronomer William Lassell in 1851. The names of the four moons come from English literature, taken from characters of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, and were proposed by Herschel’s son, John. (The names of Uranus’s children, the Titans, already had been appropriated for Saturn’s moons.) A fifth major moon, Miranda, was detected photographically by the Dutch American astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper in 1948. The tradition of naming Uranian moons after characters in Shakespeare’s and Pope’s works continued to be applied to subsequent discoveries.

Spacecraft exploration

Although the missions of the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft originally called for flybys of only Jupiter and Saturn, the timing of Voyager 2’s launch allowed for a change to its trajectory so that it could be retargeted to Uranus and Neptune for an extended mission, which ultimately was carried out. After more than eight years in space, Voyager 2 sped through the Uranian system on January 24, 1986. Its instruments provided an accurate determination of the masses and radii of the planet and its major moons, detected Uranus’s magnetic field and determined its strength and orientation, and measured the planet’s interior rotation rate. Images of the Uranian system, which totaled more than 8,000, revealed for the first time the weather patterns in the planet’s atmosphere and the surface characteristics of the moons. In addition to Voyager’s discoveries of new moons, a ring, and dust bands between the rings, it provided details of ring structure at scales not achievable from Earth. Yet, despite these achievements, Voyager left many unanswered questions that only another spacecraft mission or a major advance in Earth-based observational technology would be able to address. No future missions to Uranus are planned.