Juvenile Facts about Uranus

The planets that were known in ancient times were, naturally enough, named after the Roman gods. When more advanced instruments let us discover even more planets, it only made sense to continue that theme. But the choice of the god of the sky has led to some irresistible jokes. So today we’re looking at some fun juvenile facts about Uranus.

The Moons of Uranus

The moons of Jupiter are famously named after Jupiter’s various lovers. Fortunately, there are a lot of them to cover the large number of satellites. Since Uranus didn’t have an entire harem to work with, astronomers chose to name the moons after characters in the works of Shakespeare and Pope. Literature is, after all, a rich source of names.

One of the moons is named Puck. We don’t actually know much about Puck yet, but there are a few craters named after mischievous spirits in various cultures in keeping with Puck. Bogle and Lob are innocuous enough crater names, but it’s the one taken from German folklore that seems to have been named by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

Because who can resist naming a crater on a moon of Uranus Butz?

History of Uranus Jokes

Uranus was first observed on March 13, 1781. Amazingly, the first recorded Uranus joke was not made on March 14, 1781. For one thing, it took rather longer than that for anyone to come to a consensus on the name. We can only assume there were no 13 year old boys on the naming committee.

Always run your name by a 13 year old boy or you end up naming a planet Uranus.

And because you can find anything on the internet, someone has indeed looked into the history of Uranus based innuendo. Albert Stern identified several jokes mentioning Uranus in the 1870s that all avoided the obvious double entendre. It wasn’t until March 30, 1881 that a joke was printed that ended in “And Uranus will be at right angles.” “My what will be at right angles?”

So it took roughly a century for people to seize on the pun. But since then, no one has been able to let it go. For instance, in the game Mass Effect 2 there is a minigame that involves launching probes to harvest resources from various planets. Uranus is not particularly resource rich, so the only reason anyone would try to launch a probe there would be because of this joke. And the writers were well aware of this, having the ship’s AI respond “Really, Commander? Probing Uranus.” 

The Oxford Dictionary Tried

I’m currently taking a grammar course and one of the things we discuss is descriptivist vs prescriptivist approaches to language. Prescriptivism is the act of setting down a rule and declaring it to be correct. Which has at least been attempted by the astronomy community with regards to the seventh planet in the solar system. The official preferred pronunciation is in fact listed in the Oxford dictionary as being roughly your-in-us. That pronunciation was pushed in particular during a flyby in the 1980s in order to help newscasters keep a straight face.

But in the general public? The attempts to change the pronunciation simply haven’t stuck. The reason, I think, is fairly clear.

Gases of Uranus

The thing about Uranus being so far from Earth is we really don’t know much about it yet. We know that it has pretty blue clouds, but until recently we weren’t actually sure what gases made up that atmosphere. We had ideas and plausible reasoning for them, but we were a bit short on hard evidence.

At least until a recent spectroscopic analysis by Irwin et al. They analyzed the infrared signals gathered by the Gemini North telescope (one of the less literal telescope names). Turns out that ice giants Neptune and Uranus have a very different composition than the nearby gas giants. While there is still ammonia in the atmosphere, there is a lot more hydrogen sulfide.

Which means that it’s official.

Uranus smells like farts.