Description
Unlike other planets, Uranus spins with its poles—not its equator—pointed toward the sun as it rotates. This gives one side of the planet 42 earth years of sunshine and the other side 42 years of darkness. Uranus also has sideways rings that circle the planet from north to south, and the planet’s moons all spin sideways. The first and only visit to Uranus, in 1986, revealed that even Uranus’s magnetic field is on a sharp diagonal. How did this planet fall over on its side? The latest theory is that many different objects crashed into it, making it the strange sideways world that it is.
