Uranus.

Uranus, Uranus, Uranus.

It's a tree example of an ice giant world.

We know that it has at least 27 moods.

It might even be Diamondburgs floating around.

I don't mean the flashes, but it definitely sounds chaotic.

Yeah.

Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me,

science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smythurst.

Now we've done a few planetary episodes before, you know, we've done Mars, we've done the gas giants,

we've given Saturn and Jupiter their own episode, so it's about time that Uranus gets its own as well. Yeah, it has been a little bit too long. I think Uranus always just gets forgotten about it. You're like, sorry about that. Yeah, it's just like, yeah, Jupiter, Saturn. Oh, Neptune's cool. And Uranus is like, what? The gas giants, like Uranus the background like, hey guys. I'm here.

So coming up, Professor Lee Fletcher from the University of Leicester takes us through the basics.

Plus, I pay a visit to the Royal Astronomical Society's archive to see William Herschel's notebooks

from when he discovered the planets. And as always, Dr. Robert Massey, the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society, is here. So, Robert, what is Uranus like as a planet? You know, and it's waving to us to be like, hey, come and have a look at me. What's it like? Yeah, overlooked it by some of us, I guess. So, yeah, look, it's an example, an intriguing example of an ice giant world. So gas giant, but further from the sun, colder, smaller, but still quite big. It's the third largest planet after Jupiter and Saturn. And it was the first planet discovered with a telescope because all the other planets from Saturn inwards are fairly easy to see with the naked eye. Mercury is a bit of a challenge, but, you know, there are certain times a year when it's obvious. So we can basically assume that all of these discoveries are prehistoric, that as soon as Homo sapiens emerged or even in a hominidine ancestor, we were able to see the planets. But Uranus was found by William Herschel, the founding president of the Royal Astronomical Society,

right back in 1781, using a small telescope in his back garden in Bath with the assistance

of his sister Caroline. And it's barely visible to the naked eye if you know exactly where to look.

It takes 84 years to go around the sun. And when it was found, it's twice as far away as Saturn.

So it doubled the size of the solar system. So immediately

it sort of gave us a new sense of perspective and scale. And then the other wacky, well,

one of the many wacky things about it is that he also then six years later found the moons

Titania and Oberon with a bigger telescope. And he found that it had an odd tilt because you

see them going around the planet

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