What do you think of this fact?
Most planets spin like a top that leans a little. Not Uranus. It basically lies on its side and rolls around the Sun like a ball rolling across the floor.
A planet knocked over
According to NASA, Uranus is tilted by 97.77 degrees. For comparison, Earth manages about 23 degrees. That puts Uranus’s equator nearly at a right angle to its orbit. From the outside, it looks like someone shoved the planet over.
Nobody knows for sure how it happened. NASA names a possible cause: a collision with an object roughly the size of Earth, a very long time ago. After that, Uranus just stayed down.
Summer for half a lifetime
Uranus takes about 84 Earth years to go around the Sun once. Because it is tipped so far, first one pole and then the other points almost straight at the Sun. That is why, according to Guinness World Records, Uranus holds the record for the longest period of daylight and darkness of any planet in the solar system: each pole gets 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of continuous night.
Imagine being born at the north pole of Uranus just as the Sun comes up. You would be in your early 40s before you saw your first sunset. New Year’s Eve would need some serious planning.
NASA says this gives Uranus the most extreme seasons in the solar system. A single day, one spin around its axis, only takes about 17 hours. At the pole you would barely notice, though, because the Sun just circles the sky instead of setting.
Bonus fact: William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781 and at first thought it was a comet or a star.
Earth has seasons. Uranus has life stages.