Suit of Uranus Saturn

2002/12/24 Elhuyar Zientzia

• Astronomia

Seeing the rings seems like this, but the photo is not Saturn, but Uranus. Uranus is the seventh planet of the solar system and is about 3,000 million kilometers away, twenty times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

The photo was taken from the ESO Observatory of Chile on November 19 with the ISAAC instrument of the VLT telescope. With the clear sky they got this spectacular image of Uranus and its satellites, since the rings of Uranus are not easy to see. They cannot be seen with home telescopes, but they can be seen with ISAAC instruments that can work in the near infrared.

The rings of Urano were known very recently. It was not detected until 1977 and was confirmed in 1986, when Voyager 2 visited the planet. As for satellites, seven ESO astronomers have been identified in the photo. Uranus has a total of 21 satellites, of which 10 were found by Voyager 2.

Article on the discovery of Urano here