Like all the giant planets in the Solar System, Uranus is surrounded by a large number of satellites. Each of them has its name, and an interesting feature of the Uranian moons is that they are all associated with English literature. More precisely, these are the names of characters in the works of two authors: William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
The most English planet in the Solar System
Uranus is the first planet that people have not known existed since ancient times. Its brightness balances on the edge of the sensitivity of the human eye, meaning that it can only be systematically observed with a telescope. So, although modern astronomers have seen this gas giant several times as a star, it was only the English scientist William Herschel who proved it was a planet in 1781.
At that time, it was not yet clear what the best names for the newly discovered planets of the Solar System should be, and it was no longer considered necessary to continue using the names of heroes of ancient mythology. So Herschel decided that it would be a good idea to name the new planet in honor of his patron saint, the English King George III.
Not all astronomers liked this idea. The name “George’s Star” was too much of a reminder that the United Kingdom was a rising superpower that was persistently annexing more and more lands.
Nevertheless, in the astronomical literature, “George’s Star” lasted quite a long time. It began to be called Uranus in honor of the ancient god of the sky only after 1823, and this name was finally established only in the middle of the 19th century.
The largest satellites of Uranus
The situation was further complicated by the fact that William Herschel reported that Uranus had as many as six satellites. He discovered two in 1787, two in 1790, and two more in 1794. However, he was able to do this only because he had the largest optical telescope at the time, which people could not build for another half century. Therefore, no one else could confirm the existence of these satellites. Herschel did not even name them, but simply labeled them with Roman numerals from I to VI.
This lasted until 1851, when another English astronomer, William Lassell, had the opportunity to examine Uranus’ surroundings properly. He found out that only two of the six Herschelian moons actually existed, but additionally discovered two more that his predecessor had not noticed.
With this in mind, William Herschel’s son John, who was also an astronomer, decided to finally name the four existing moons of Uranus. There were still no established traditions for naming celestial bodies, and the scientist was not impressed by the habit of using Greek and Roman mythology. He therefore turned to English literature to emphasize the primacy of the British in the discovery of the seventh planet.
John took the names for the first two satellites discovered by William Herschel from the play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by the greatest English playwright, William Shakespeare. Since then, the largest of the planet’s satellites has been called Oberon in honor of the king of the fairies, and the second largest was named after the fairy queen Titania.
The astronomer decided to name the two satellites discovered by Lassell in honor of the characters in Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock. This peculiar fantasy in verse, written in the first half of the 18th century, is a parody of all the epic poems that had been created before. It tells of a war between light and dark spirits, which was triggered by a minor event: a man in love with the beautiful Belinda cut off a lock of hair.
So the third and fourth satellites of Uranus are named after the representatives of the fantastic peoples who fight in the poem. The first of them is Umbriel, the evil and melancholy leader of the dwarves, the spirits of the earth. His name is related to the Latin Umbra, which means shadow.
Ariel is the name of the main sylph, the air spirit, in The Rape of the Lock. He is also one of the characters in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where he is an air spirit who serves the wizard Prospero.
Miranda
The four largest satellites of Uranus are quite large bodies. That is why they could be seen with 19th century telescopes at a distance of 2.8 billion km, as their diameters range from 1150 to 1600 km. All of them consist of a mixture of ice and rocks, which gravity has shaped into an almost regular shape.
Oberon, Titania, Ariel, and Umbriel have been studied by only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, which flew past them in 1985 and did not get a good look at everything. That is why we know mostly the most general things about them. The fifth moon of Uranus was discovered in 1948, almost a century after the previous two. It was made by the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper, the same one who suggested the possibility of an external “asteroid belt” around the Sun. The rules for naming Solar System bodies had not yet been finalized, so he decided not to break with tradition and named the new celestial body after the daughter of the wizard Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Miranda is one of the most amazing satellites in the Solar System. Its size is only 472 km, so gravitational forces, when compressing the ice and rocks, failed to give them a perfectly regular spherical shape. As a result, it seems to be covered with large flat hills. The edges of these “hillocks” are giant cliffs that reach a depth of up to 20 km. The deepest of these is the Verona Rupes, whose name is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Due to Miranda’s low gravity, it takes as long as 12 minutes to fall from it.
Satellites discovered by Voyager 2
After Miranda’s discovery, the study of Uranus’ moons was suspended for almost forty years. During this time, the International Astronomical Union approved the rules for naming objects in the Solar System. Accordingly, the tradition of using the names of characters from Shakespeare and other English writers to name Uranus’ moons became official.
When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1985, it not only explored five of its already known moons but also discovered 11 new ones. Of these, only one was named after Pope’s character. The elongated body with approximate dimensions of 128×64×64 km was named Belinda, in honor of the very heroine of the poem, whose curls started it all.
Ten others were named after Shakespearean characters. Puck is named after one of the spirits who serve Titania and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Cordelia is the daughter of King Lear from the play of the same name, Ophelia from Hamlet, and Bianca from the comedy The Taming of the Shrew. Cressida, on the other hand, is the protagonist of the English playwright’s tragedy Troilus and Cressida, in which he played on the myth of the Trojan War.
Desdemona was named after a poor woman who was strangled by her jealous husband in the tragedy Othello, and Juliet is an equally unfortunate girl from another famous tragedy. Portia, Rosalind, and Perdita are named after the heroines of The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and The Winter’s Tale.
Interestingly, the name of the last heroine in Ukrainian editions of Shakespeare is translated as Loss, because this word fully corresponds to the essence of the character. The satellite named after her was also once “lost”. Perdita was missed in the Voyager 2 images during their initial analysis and was rediscovered only in the late 1990s.
All of the satellites discovered by the interplanetary probe are small, irregularly shaped rocks, measuring several tens of kilometers in size. The only exceptions are Pak and Portia, which are 162 and 135 kilometers in size, respectively.
Other satellites of Uranus
In the 1990s, astronomers discovered five more satellites near Uranus, bringing the total number to 21. They were named after characters from the same Shakespeare play, The Tempest, where Miranda and Ariel “come from.” This time, the lucky ones are Prospero, the sorcerer, Caliban, the savage who serves him, the sorceress Sycorax, who is Caliban’s mother, and the demon Sethebos and the drunkard Stefano.
Among these satellites, only the 190-kilometer-long Sycorax, the sixth-largest satellite of Uranus, is interesting. It orbits in a rather elongated orbit, and its journey around the planet lasts 3.5 years. This fact, as well as the unusual reddish color of its surface, leads scientists to believe that it may be an object of the Kuiper belt, which was once captured by the planet.
Six more satellites of Uranus were discovered in the 21st century. Of course, all of them were named after characters from Shakespeare’s plays, and in the case of three of them, it was the same “The Tempest”. This time, they were named after the jester Trinculo, the son of King Ferdinand of Naples and the courtier Francisco.
Another satellite was named after the heroine of the comedy Much Ado About Nothing, Margarita. The last two, however, somewhat violate the rule of names being related to English literature. And while Cupid, the same as the god of love and also called Cupid, is still a minor character in the play, Meb is only mentioned in Romeo and Juliet. In general, this is a fairy queen from English folklore, but researchers still argue whether Shakespeare borrowed her from folk tales or, on the contrary, she got there from him. There is no doubt that the queen of the magical people has been present in the folklore of the British Isles since prehistoric times. But it seems that the name Meb was invented by the great playwright himself, and only then was it picked up by everyone else, including astronomers.
In any case, there are currently 27 known moons in the Uranus system. Ten of them (including Ariel) are named after characters from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 15 more are named after characters from other works by the author, and two more are named after characters from Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. So, if this planet is found to have another satellite, there is no doubt where astronomers will draw inspiration for its name.
This article was published in Universe Space Tech magazine #1 (189) 2023. You can buy this issue in the electronic version in our store.
