When William Herschel first spotted Uranus with a telescope on March 13, 1781 the discovery opened up the solar system. There were planets beyond what the ancients knew! There was a planet that takes a human lifetime (84 years) to go once around the sun! But for 200 years, Uranus was just a point of light in a telescope’s eyepiece and we could see few details.
PHOTOS: Voyager 2’s Epic Outer Solar System Odyssey
To celebrate the 235th anniversary of Uranus’ discovery, here are some of the most mind-blowing things discovered about the blue planet. It’s only been visited once, by Voyager 2 in 1986, but we also study it from afar with powerful modern telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Imagine what discoveries we’ll come up with the next time we send a probe that far out in the solar system.
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