Uranus The Coldest Planet in the Solar System As you can see, Uranus is a very interesting planet just by looking at the picture above - it's blue, it's big and it's cold. It is much larger than our home planet "Earth". Uranus is the 7th planet from the sun orbiting at 2.88 billion km. But it is still much closer than Neptune, witch averages a distance of 4.5 billion km from the sun. Unlike other planets in the solar system Uranus is extremely frigid! It actually gives off less heat than it receives from the sun. Other planets in the solar system have very hot cores. But something made the core in Uranus cool down to a point where it doesn't radiate much heat. The temperature of the cloud tops on Uranus can cool down to -224 degrees farenheit. THATS COLD!!
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The Uranus Axis Like Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus is a gas giant. But Uranus is a little different. Unlike all the other planets and most of the moons in our Solar System, Uranus spins on its side. It is believed that long ago, a very large object smashed into this planet. The crash was so powerful that it completely changed the direction of Uranus' planetary rotation. Also, a more recent theory (or story) is that the extreme tilt of Uranus' axis may have been caused by a large moon that was slowly pulled away from the planet by another large planet long ago when our Solar System was still new. It is thought that the gravitational pull of this moon moving away from Uranus may have caused it to tilt on its side. |
