{"id":2292,"date":"2015-01-26T08:23:20","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T08:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=2292"},"modified":"2015-01-26T08:23:20","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T08:23:20","slug":"the-seasons-on-uranus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/the-seasons-on-uranus\/","title":{"rendered":"The seasons on Uranus"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo<\/a>
Photo Credit: Erich Karkoschka, NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Similar to the Earth, Uranus also has four seasons. But there is difference in ending period of every seasons in between Uranus and Earth.<\/span><\/p>\n

For starters, the length of Uranus\u2019 seasons are different from ours. It takes Earth 365 days to orbit around the sun, but it takes Uranus 84 years, more or less. So, each season on Uranus lasts 21 (Earth) years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Uranus\u2019 seasons are also different from Earth\u2019s because the tilts of our planets are different.<\/span><\/p>\n

Uranus, like Earth, has a nearly circular orbit, so it remains at the same distance from the sun throughout its long year. It\u2019s the planet\u2019s tilt that gives Uranus its seasons, just as Earth\u2019s seasons are caused by our world\u2019s tilt on its axis. But Uranus tilts much more than Earth. Imagine Uranus as a large bead on a stick. The bead spins on the stick about every 17 hours. The stick also travels around the sun. But the stick isn\u2019t straight up and down relative to the sun. Instead, it\u2019s tilted off the vertical by 82 degrees. In other words, Uranus is lying down nearly sideways with respect to its orbit around the sun.<\/span><\/p>\n

Uranus\u2019 axis of rotation \u2013 that is, its angle of tilt \u2013 stays the same as the planet moves around the sun. So imagine the sun in the image above, just outside the frame, either to the left or right. It would be shining on Uranus\u2019 poles, making it summer on half the planet, and winter on the other half. That is the case for half of Uranus\u2019 orbit. For two 21-year seasons out of its 84 year orbit around the sun, the poles are pointed more or less at the sun.<\/span><\/p>\n

During Uranus\u2019 winter or summer, even as the planet rotates in its approximately 17-hour day, the winter side of the planet never sees the sun. It doesn\u2019t see the sun for 21 long years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now the other two seasons \u2013 spring and fall on Uranus. At those seasons, Uranus is oriented in its orbit so that sunlight strikes its equatorial region. During the planet\u2019s spring and fall, there\u2019s a day and night cycle in the equatorial regions that\u2019s not dissimilar to that on Earth, except, on Uranus, a day lasts about 17 hours.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382\"<\/a>Uranus has been visited by one spacecraft \u2013 the NASA spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1986. At the time, Uranus was in its northern hemisphere winter, and Voyager saw Uranus as blue and featureless.<\/span><\/p>\n

Around the year 2000, and as Uranus moved in its 84-year orbit around the sun, the planet was just coming out of the grip of its decades-long northern winter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Its northern hemisphere spring equinox occurred in 2007; that\u2019s when the sun was shining above Uranus\u2019 equator. Sunlight was reaching some latitudes for the first time in years. The light and warmth in the atmosphere triggered gigantic springtime storms comparable in size to North America (but with temperatures of 300\u00b0 below zero). Observers on Earth saw more clouds in the atmosphere of Uranus \u2013 and bands encircling the planet that had changed in size and brightness \u2013 as sunlight struck parts of the planet for the first time in over two decades.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Similar to the Earth, Uranus also has four seasons. But there is difference in ending period of every seasons in between Uranus and Earth. For starters, the length of Uranus\u2019 seasons are different from ours. It takes Earth 365 days to orbit around the sun, but it takes Uranus 84 years, more or less. So, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382-212x300.jpg",212,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",404,570,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",426,600,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",348,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",255,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",46,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",500,705,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",68,96,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/uranus-rings-sideways-e1422013515382.jpg",150,212,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"News<\/a>","tag_info":"News","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}