360William Herschel discovers Uranus
On 13 March 1781, the musician and amateur astronomer William Herschel spotted a faint disc through his home-made telescope in Bath, England. It was a new planet, Uranus, the first discovered with a telescope and the first unknown to ancient astronomers. It doubled the known size of the solar system.
William Herschel was born in Hanover and moved to England, where he worked as a musician and composer. In his spare time he built powerful telescopes and surveyed the night sky with his sister Caroline.
On 13 March 1781, from the garden of his house in Bath, he noticed an object that was not a point of light like a star, but a tiny disc. He first thought it was a comet.
Other astronomers calculated its orbit and found that it was a planet, about twice as far from the Sun as Saturn. Herschel wanted to name it after King George III, but the name Uranus, after the Greek god of the sky, was eventually adopted.
The King made Herschel his astronomer, so he could work full time. He went on to discover moons of Uranus and Saturn, and infrared radiation. Caroline Herschel became the first woman paid as a scientist in Britain.
- 13 March 1781
- Herschel spots Uranus
- 1787
- He discovers two moons of Uranus
- 1800
- Herschel discovers infrared radiation
- 1986
- Voyager 2 flies past Uranus
Sources: Royal Astronomical Society · Herschel Museum of Astronomy · NASA.