The Planets with the Giant Diamonds Inside
On the dark night of March 13, 1781, William Herschel settled down in his garden observatory in Bath, England, for a routine night of observing stars, when he noticed something out of place in the heavens. Through the eyepiece of his homemade 7-foot telescope, he spied an interloper in the constellation Gemini: “a curious, either nebulous star or perhaps a comet,” as he recorded it. For weeks, he stalked the unknown object, monitoring its steady appearance and circular path around the sun until there could be no doubt about its true identity. He had discovered not a comet but a new planet, far more distant than any of the others.
Being a politically astute fellow, Herschel proposed naming the planet Georgium Sidus, or “George’s star,” in honor of King George III. The ploy worked—he promptly was named the king’s astronomer and received a royal stipend—but his colleagues outside of England objected. They wanted a noble and politically neutral name like Urania, the Greek muse of astronomy. In the end, scientists settled on the even more dignified “Uranus,” the ancient Greek god of the sky and ancestor of the other deities. Centuries of snickering ensued.
But seriously. Uranus orbits the sun at twice the distance of Saturn, so Herschel’s discovery instantly doubled the size of the known solar system. From a modern perspective, it’s hard to appreciate how shocking that was. At the time, the solar system was the only charted region of space; nobody yet had a clue about how far away even the nearest the stars were. In effect, Herschel had doubled the size of the entire known universe. He also brushed away the final traces of classical astronomy and astrology. Uranus is typically described as the first planet discovered since antiquity, but it’s more accurate to say it was the first planet to be discovered, period. All the others are readily visible to the naked eye, and so were known to all. Uranus shattered the common assumption that there were no more planets beyond the six classical ones, establishing an endless-frontier ethos that resonates through science and science fiction to this day.
The cloudy surfaces of Uranus and Neptune are marked with raging storms and the fastest winds recorded on any planet.
That ethos is part of daily life says, ‘explore strange, new worlds’,” Runyon says. “If you like seat-of-your-pants, Captain Picard-style exploration, then Uranus and Neptune have to rank high in your list.”
