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Uranus

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It is a gas giant, the third largest by diameter and fourth largest by mass. NASA's Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited the planet and no other visits are currently planned. Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Uranus on January 24, 1986, before continuing its journey to Neptune.

Uranus is the first planet discovered in modern times. Sir William Herschel formally discovered the planet on March 13, 1781; the other planets (from Mercury out to Saturn) have been known since ancient times, and Uranus' discovery expanded the boundaries of the solar system for the first time in modern human history. It was also the first planet discovered using technology (a telescope) rather than the naked eye.

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Space & Time News

November 16, 2025

Researchers combined deep learning with high-resolution physics to create the first Milky Way model that tracks over 100 billion stars individually. Their AI learned how gas behaves after supernovae, removing one of the biggest computational ...
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Researchers engineered “gyromorphs,” a new type of metamaterial that combines liquid-like randomness with large-scale structural patterns to block light from every direction. This innovation solves longstanding limitations in quasicrystal-based ...
Arctic sea ice is disappearing fast, and scientists have turned to an unexpected cosmic clue—space dust—to uncover how ice has changed over tens of thousands of years. By tracking helium-3–bearing dust trapped (or blocked) by ancient ice, ...
New research from UBC Okanagan mathematically demonstrates that the universe cannot be simulated. Using Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, scientists found that reality requires “non-algorithmic understanding,” something no computation can ...
A team of astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to create the first 3D atmospheric map of an exoplanet. The fiery WASP-18b, a massive “ultra-hot Jupiter,” revealed striking temperature contrasts, including regions so hot they destroy ...
Scientists have developed a groundbreaking tool called Effort.jl that lets them simulate the structure of the universe using just a laptop. The team created a system that dramatically speeds up how researchers study cosmic data, turning what once ...
Tohoku University researchers have found a way to make quantum sensors more sensitive by connecting superconducting qubits in optimized network patterns. These networks amplify faint signals possibly left by dark matter. The approach outperformed ...
Two Sydney PhD students have pulled off a remarkable space science feat from Earth—using AI-driven software to correct image blurring in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their innovation, called AMIGO, fixed distortions in the telescope’s ...
A UCLA-led team has achieved the sharpest-ever view of a distant star’s disk using a groundbreaking photonic lantern device on a single telescope—no multi-telescope array required. This technology splits incoming starlight into multiple ...
Researchers propose that hydrogen gas from the early Universe emitted detectable radio waves influenced by dark matter. Studying these signals, especially from the Moon’s radio-quiet environment, could reveal how dark matter clumped together ...
3I/ATLAS, a mysterious interstellar object racing toward the Sun, is baffling scientists with its speed and origin. Some researchers suggest it could even be alien-made, drawing comparisons to probes ...

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