Planets · Ice giant

Uranus

2.9 billion km from the Sun · Light crosses it in 0.17 seconds

Across

50,724 km

Vs Earth

0.36× Jupiter

Mass

15 Earths

Open Uranus in Cosmic Scale

About

Uranus was the first planet discovered with a telescope, and it is tipped over: its axis lies almost in the plane of its orbit, so it rolls around the Sun on its side. Each pole gets 42 years of sunlight followed by 42 years of darkness.

It rolls around the Sun on its side, tilted 98 degrees.

At a glance

Year	84 years
Day	17 hours, backwards
Axis tilt	98 degrees
Moons	28 known

Did you know

1. Its atmosphere is the coldest in the Solar System, reaching −224 °C.
2. Its moons are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, not mythology.
3. The tilt was probably caused by one or more giant impacts early in its life.

Real photos

• Uranus and its rings in infrared, from Webb's 2025 study of its upper atmosphere — ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, P. Tiranti, H. Melin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) (CC BY 4.0) · source
• Uranus from Voyager 2, 1986 — the only spacecraft to visit — NASA/JPL-Caltech · source
• Uranus and its rings in infrared, James Webb Space Telescope, 2023 — NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI) (CC BY 4.0) · source