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Uranus, the Other Lord of the Rings, Photographed with its Moons
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 02:10 pm ET
31 December 2002
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Another 'Lord of the Rings' Don't be fooled, the "lidless eye" seen in the image accompanying this story is not the Solar System's ring-lord Saturn. It is in fact Saturn's rival Uranus, as it appears in the near-infrared and photographed by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The seven visible companions are some of Uranus's moons, named for characters in another great fantasy story; William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Normally invisible to Earth-bound observers, Uranus's rings are so faint and tenuous they went undiscovered until 1977 when they dimmed the light of a background star as the planet passed in front of it. In 1986, Voyager-2 directly photographed Uranus's ring system from close up. The new picture shows a near-infrared view of the Uranus with rings and some of its moons, obtained on November 19, 2002, with the ISAAC multi-mode instrument on the 8.2-m VLT ANTU telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile). The rings stand out dramatically at this wavelength as the icy particles of the ring reflect the heat radiation of the Sun. This same wavelength of infrared light is absorbed almost completely by Uranus's atmosphere, making the planet appear unusually dark. Adding to the confusion, the angle at which Uranus is currently visible is very similar to how Saturn often appears. But Uranus's tilt is so extreme that we more often see the planet from directly "above" its north or south poles. The current Saturn-like appearance is a rare sight.
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