Uranus Trivia
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48 free Uranus trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Uranus trivia quiz is about the planet, the first one found with a telescope and still the least visited. It opens with the discovery story: Herschel's 'comet' in a Bath garden, the Georgium Sidus that Britain wanted, Bode's mythological fix, the element uranium and the seventy-year argument over the name. Then the planet itself: rolled on its side, 42-year polar days, the coldest recorded temperature of any planet, a magnetic field pointing 59 degrees the wrong way, almost no internal heat, and possibly diamond hail. The rings and moons follow: thirteen coal-black rings found by accident during a stellar occultation, moons named for Shakespeare and Pope, Titania, Miranda's 20-km canyons and the tally of 29. Voyager 2's single 1986 visit gets its due, along with the orbiter mission planetary scientists have made their top priority. A final group covers the pronunciation astronomers prefer, the Chinese Heavenly King star, Holst, Keats and the planet's role in astrology. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on each question, so it suits a classroom, a pub quiz or a space enthusiast. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Planets and Solar System quizzes for more.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where does Uranus rank in distance from the Sun?
Seventh
Seventh. It orbits about twice as far out as the sixth planet, so its discovery in 1781 roughly doubled the width of the known Solar System.
Q 02Uranus was the first planet to be discovered with the help of what?
A telescope
A telescope. The astronomer who found it built his own, and in 1781 it showed him a faint object creeping against the background stars from night to night.
Q 03What did Herschel first report his new object to be?
A comet
A comet. He kept calling it one for months, but its nearly circular path convinced other astronomers it was a planet, and by 1783 he agreed.
Q 04What name did Herschel want to give Uranus, in honour of his royal patron?
Georgium Sidus (George's Star)
Georgium Sidus, or George's Star. Herschel reasoned the name would tell future ages that the planet first came to light in the reign of George III.
Q 05In myth Jupiter was Saturn's son, so Bode named the next planet after Saturn's what?
Father
Father. Bode wanted the new planet to extend the mythological family line outward from Jupiter, and by about 1850 his name had displaced every rival.
Q 06Uranus is the only planet whose English name comes from which mythology?
Greek
Greek. The name was chosen to match the other planets, yet theirs are all Roman; the matching pick would have been Caelus, the Roman counterpart of Ouranos.
Q 07In ancient myth, Uranus (Ouranos) was the god of what?
The sky
The sky. Ouranos was the heavens personified and husband of Gaia, the Earth; in Hesiod's poem their youngest Titan son ambushed and overthrew him.
Q 08A spacecraft trying to land on Uranus would do what?
Sink until it was crushed
Sink until it was crushed. Uranus has no solid surface to land on: its gases simply thicken with depth, and the rising pressure and temperature would destroy a metal craft long before it reached anything firm.
Q 09In which country did the name Herschel chose for Uranus stay in use for decades?
Britain
Britain. Astronomers elsewhere refused to honour a foreign king, and Uranus only became the standard name around 1850, almost 70 years after the discovery.
Q 10Uranus's rotation axis is tilted so far that the planet essentially does what?
Rolls on its side
Rolls on its side. With the axis tipped about 98 degrees, one pole points almost straight at the Sun for part of each orbit while the other faces away into night.
Q 11How long is a year on Uranus?
84 Earth years
84 Earth years. A single lap lasts about a human lifetime: Uranus first returned to the spot where it was discovered in 1865, and only for the second time in 1949.
Q 12Because Uranus orbits tipped over, it has the Solar System's most extreme what?
Seasons
Seasons. Each lasts about 21 Earth years, and around midsummer one pole faces the Sun almost directly while the other half of the planet sits through a long, sunless winter.
Q 13Uranus spins in the opposite direction to most planets, a quirk it shares with which other planet?
Venus
Venus. Both turn the opposite way to the other six planets, so on Venus the Sun rises in the west; one backward spin of Uranus takes about 17 hours.
Q 21How were Uranus's rings discovered in 1977?
A star flickered as they crossed it
A star flickered as they crossed it. Astronomers on a flying observatory only meant to watch Uranus hide the star, but it blinked out five times before the planet arrived and five times after.
Q 22The main rings of Uranus are notably what?
Dark
Dark. They bounce back only about 2% of the sunlight that hits them, and are thought to be ice coated in material that radiation has blackened.
Q 23The moons of Uranus are named after characters from which two writers?
Shakespeare and Alexander Pope
Q 14Unlike the larger gas giants, Uranus and its outer neighbour are classed as what type of planet?
Ice giants
Ice giants. The name misleads: most of the planet is a hot, dense fluid of water, ammonia and other 'icy' compounds that reaches thousands of degrees near the core.
Q 15Uranus holds which Solar System record?
Coldest atmosphere
Coldest atmosphere. It has dipped to 49 K, about −224 °C, colder than anything measured on Neptune, which orbits a billion miles farther from the Sun.
Q 16Compared with the other giant planets, Uranus gives off surprisingly little of what?
Internal heat
Internal heat. The other giant planets all give off markedly more energy than the Sun supplies them, while Uranus radiates scarcely any extra, and no one is sure why.
Q 17What is the leading explanation for Uranus's tilt?
An Earth-sized impact early in its history
An Earth-sized impact early in its history. The blow is thought to have knocked the young planet over, and its rings and moons now circle it sideways too.
Q 18Only two planets are wider than Uranus, but where does it rank among the planets by mass?
Fourth
Fourth. Neptune is slightly smaller across but denser, so it outweighs Uranus, which at about 14.5 Earth masses is the lightest of the four giant planets.
Q 19What do scientists think may rain down deep inside Uranus?
Diamond 'hailstones'
Diamond 'hailstones'. In 2017 physicists shocked plastic with a powerful laser to mimic those depths and watched tiny diamonds form; inside the planet they would slowly settle toward the core.
Q 20Which telescope's 2023 infrared image showed 11 of Uranus's 13 rings?
Webb
Webb. A 12-minute exposure was enough to pick out dusty rings that only a passing spacecraft and the Keck Observatory had managed to image before.
Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Moons elsewhere are mostly named for figures from classical myth; these alone take theirs from English literature.
Q 24Astronomers found in 2018 that the clouds of Uranus hold a gas that would make them smell of what?
Rotten eggs
Rotten eggs. The culprit is hydrogen sulfide, which the Gemini North observatory in Hawaii picked out above the cloud tops after decades of hints from deeper down.
Q 25What is the largest moon of Uranus?
Titania
Titania. Even the biggest of the family is less than half as wide as our Moon, about 1,600 km across, and it is scarred by fault valleys almost as long as the moon is wide.
Q 26Which small moon of Uranus has fault canyons 20 km deep and a chaotic patchwork surface?
Miranda
Miranda. Its gravity is so feeble and its cliffs so tall that a rock dropped from the highest, Verona Rupes, would fall for around ten minutes before landing.
Q 27The last of Uranus's five large moons was found in 1948 by which astronomer?
Gerard Kuiper
Gerard Kuiper. He spotted the little moon in photographs taken at McDonald Observatory in Texas, and no further moon turned up until a spacecraft arrived almost four decades later.
Q 28Which is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus?
Voyager 2
Voyager 2. Originally meant to visit just two planets, it rode a planetary line-up that comes round once every 175 years and flew on to Uranus.
Q 29Which space disaster struck just four days after the only spacecraft flyby of Uranus?
Challenger
Challenger. The shuttle was lost on 28 January 1986, four days after the closest approach, so the first close-up pictures of Uranus shared the week's news with a tragedy.
Q 30What did the only spacecraft to visit Uranus find odd about its magnetic field?
It is tilted and off-centre
It is tilted and off-centre. The magnetic axis leans 59 degrees from the spin axis and misses the planet's centre by a third of its radius, so the auroras sit far from the poles.