Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Uranus trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Uranus trivia quiz is about the planet, the first one found with a telescope and still the least visited. It opens with the discovery story: Herschel's 'comet' in a Bath garden, the Georgium Sidus that Britain wanted, Bode's mythological fix, the element uranium and the seventy-year argument over the name. Then the planet itself: rolled on its side, 42-year polar days, the coldest recorded temperature of any planet, a magnetic field pointing 59 degrees the wrong way, almost no internal heat, and possibly diamond hail. The rings and moons follow: thirteen coal-black rings found by accident during a stellar occultation, moons named for Shakespeare and Pope, Titania, Miranda's 20-km canyons and the tally of 29. Voyager 2's single 1986 visit gets its due, along with the orbiter mission planetary scientists have made their top priority. A final group covers the pronunciation astronomers prefer, the Chinese Heavenly King star, Holst, Keats and the planet's role in astrology. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on each question, so it suits a classroom, a pub quiz or a space enthusiast. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. Try our Planets and Solar System quizzes for more.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where does Uranus rank in distance from the Sun?
Seventh
It sits between Saturn and Neptune, roughly twice as far out as Saturn.
Q 02Who discovered Uranus in 1781?
William Herschel
He spotted it from his garden in Bath with a homemade 6.2-inch reflector, and first thought it was a comet.
Q 03What did Herschel first report his new object to be?
A comet
Anders Lexell computed its nearly circular orbit and showed it had to be a planet.
Q 04What name did Herschel want to give the planet, in honour of his royal patron?
Georgium Sidus (George's Star)
King George III liked it; astronomers outside Britain did not, and 'the Georgian Planet' never caught on.
Q 05Who proposed the name Uranus, in 1782?
Johann Elert Bode
Lalande wanted to call it Herschel; Bode argued the new planet should be the father of Saturn, as Saturn was father of Jupiter.
Q 06Uranus is the only planet whose English name comes from which mythology?
Greek
The Roman equivalent of Ouranos would have been Caelus, but Bode apparently did not realise that.
Q 07In Greek myth, Uranus (Ouranos) was the god of what?
The sky
He was the father of Cronus (Saturn) and grandfather of Zeus (Jupiter).
Q 08Which chemical element was named in 1789 in support of the name Uranus?
Uranium
Martin Klaproth, Bode's colleague at the Royal Academy, named his new element after the new planet.
Q 09How long did it take for astronomers to agree on the name Uranus?
Almost 70 years
Britain clung to Georgium Sidus well into the 19th century.
Q 10Uranus's rotation axis is tilted so far that the planet essentially does what?
Rolls on its side
Its axis lies almost in the plane of its orbit, at about 98 degrees, so each pole gets 42 years of daylight then 42 of night.
Q 11How long is a year on Uranus?
84 Earth years
Since its discovery it has passed its discovery position only twice, in 1865 and 1949, and will again in 2033.
Q 12Each pole of Uranus gets roughly how many years of continuous sunlight, then the same in darkness?
42
Voyager 2 arrived during southern summer and could not see the northern hemisphere at all.
Q 13Roughly how long is Uranus's rotation period?
About 17 hours
It rotates retrograde by the IAU definition, and the interior period was pinned down by tracking its aurorae.
Q 21How were Uranus's rings definitively discovered in 1977?
By watching a star blink as the planet passed in front of it
James Elliot's team aboard the Kuiper Airborne Observatory had only meant to study the atmosphere during the occultation.
Q 22Uranus's rings reflect roughly what fraction of the light that hits them?
About 2%
They are among the darkest objects in the Solar System, possibly blackened by radiation.
Q 23The moons of Uranus are named after characters from which two writers?
Shakespeare and Alexander Pope
Q 14Uranus and its outer neighbour are classified as what type of planet?
Ice giants
Water, ammonia and methane 'ices' dominate their bulk, unlike hydrogen-and-helium Jupiter and Saturn.
Q 15Which planet has the lowest recorded minimum temperature in the Solar System?
Uranus
Its tropopause has dropped to 49 K, or −224 °C, colder even than more distant Neptune.
Q 16What is odd about Uranus's energy budget compared with the other giant planets?
It radiates almost no excess internal heat
Neptune, its near twin, radiates 2.6 times what it absorbs; Uranus barely breaks even, and nobody knows why.
Q 17What theory is offered for both Uranus's tilt and its low internal heat?
An Earth-sized impact early in its history
The impactor may have knocked the planet over and let it vent most of its primordial heat.
Q 18Uranus's mass is about how many times Earth's, making it the least massive giant planet?
14.5
Its diameter is roughly four times Earth's, slightly bigger than Neptune's.
Q 19Deep inside Uranus, extreme pressure may turn methane's carbon into what?
Diamond 'hailstones'
Lab experiments even suggest a sea of liquid metallic carbon with floating 'diamond-bergs' at the base of the mantle.
Q 20How many rings does Uranus have, according to the article?
13
They are extremely dark, reflecting only about 2% of the light that hits them; the brightest is the epsilon ring.
Titania, Oberon, Miranda and Ariel are Shakespeare's; Umbriel and Belinda come from Pope's The Rape of the Lock.
Q 24Which are the five major moons of Uranus?
Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon
Together they weigh less than half of Neptune's Triton alone.
Q 25What is the largest moon of Uranus?
Titania
With a radius under 790 km it is only the eighth-largest moon in the Solar System, less than half the size of our Moon.
Q 26Which small moon of Uranus has fault canyons 20 km deep and a chaotic patchwork surface?
Miranda
Its cliff Verona Rupes may be the tallest in the Solar System; the chaos likely came from tidal heating during a past resonance with Umbriel.
Q 27How many known moons does Uranus have, according to the article?
29
Nineteen are regular moons and ten are distant irregular ones.
Q 28Which is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus?
Voyager 2
It flew past on 24 January 1986, found 10 new moons and two new rings, and carried on to Neptune.
Q 29In what year did the only spacecraft flyby of Uranus take place?
1986
It came within 81,500 km of the cloud tops.
Q 30What did the 1986 flyby find peculiar about Uranus's magnetic field?
It is tilted 59° and offset from the centre
The dipole is shifted a third of the way to the south pole, giving a lopsided, corkscrewing magnetotail.