Uranus Planet Coloring Page: Free Printable PDF Sheet

Uranus, the Planet Tipped on Its Side

A Planet Knocked Over Long Ago

Uranus is famous for spinning almost completely on its side, tilted about 98 degrees compared to Earth's gentle 23-degree tilt, so it essentially rolls around the sun like a ball instead of spinning upright like most other planets. Scientists believe a massive collision with another large object, possibly early in the solar system's history, knocked Uranus onto its side and it has stayed that way ever since.

That extreme tilt means Uranus experiences some of the strangest seasons in the solar system, with each pole pointing almost directly at the sun for about 21 years straight before swinging into darkness for another 21 years, since one full orbit around the sun takes Uranus roughly 84 Earth years to complete.

Rings That Circle Top to Bottom

Because Uranus is tipped on its side, its ring system appears to circle the planet from top to bottom rather than around its middle like Saturn's rings, exactly as shown in this scene. Uranus's rings were discovered by accident in 1977, when astronomers watched a distant star blink several times before and after Uranus passed in front of it, revealing narrow rings that block starlight even though they are far too faint to see with ordinary telescopes.

Unlike Saturn's bright icy rings, Uranus's rings are made of dark, narrow bands of particles that reflect very little light, which is part of why they went unnoticed for so long after the planet itself was discovered.

An Icy Blue-Green World

Uranus gets its pale blue-green color from methane gas in its atmosphere, which absorbs red light much like Neptune's atmosphere does, though Uranus appears slightly paler and more uniform in photographs. Astronomers classify Uranus and Neptune together as ice giants, a category separate from gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, because both planets contain large amounts of water, ammonia, and methane ices swirling beneath their outer atmospheres.

Uranus was the first planet discovered using a telescope rather than observed with the naked eye, spotted by astronomer William Herschel in 1781, who at first mistook it for a comet before further observation confirmed it orbited the sun like a planet.

A Chilly World With Many Moons

Uranus holds the record for the coldest planetary atmosphere in the solar system, with temperatures dropping to about minus 371 degrees Fahrenheit, even colder than more distant Neptune despite Uranus sitting closer to the sun. Uranus has 27 known moons, most of them named after characters from the plays of William Shakespeare and the poetry of Alexander Pope, including Titania, Oberon, and Miranda.

Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus up close: NASA's Voyager 2 flew past it in 1986 during its grand tour of the outer solar system, capturing the only detailed photographs of the sideways planet that scientists have ever collected.

NASA and the wider astronomy community have since proposed a dedicated Uranus orbiter and probe mission for launch sometime in the 2030s, aiming to study its odd magnetic field, off-center tilt, and ring system up close for the first time since that single brief Voyager 2 flyby nearly four decades earlier, and to search its icy moons for signs of hidden subsurface oceans.