The Garden of Learning

Science

Which planet's moons are mostly named after Shakespeare characters?

  • Uranus
  • Neptune
  • Saturn

The answer is Uranus. Titania, Oberon, Miranda.

Uranus. Every other planet's moons come from Greek and Roman mythology; Uranus's are named for characters in Shakespeare and Alexander Pope - Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Miranda, Puck, Umbriel. The convention started with John Herschel, son of the planet's discoverer, in 1852, and the International Astronomical Union has stuck to it since, so new moons still get Shakespearean names.

Miranda is the strangest object of the set. It is only about 470 kilometres across and looks assembled rather than formed - enormous grooved terraces, mismatched terrain butting up against itself, and a cliff called Verona Rupes with a drop of perhaps twenty kilometres, the tallest known anywhere. In the low gravity, something falling off it would take around twelve minutes to reach the bottom.

The moons all orbit in the planet's tipped plane, at about 98 degrees to the Solar System, which is one of the reasons the collision theory for Uranus's tilt is awkward - whatever knocked the planet over either happened before the moons formed or took them with it. Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft ever to visit, for a few hours in 1986, and essentially everything known about these worlds comes from that afternoon.