Titania is the eighth largest moon in the Solar System at a diameter of 1,578 kilometres. Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, Titania is named after the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its orbit lies inside Uranus’s magnetosphere, which co-rotates with the planet.
About Titania (moon) in brief
Titania is the eighth largest moon in the Solar System at a diameter of 1,578 kilometres. Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, Titania is named after the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Its orbit lies inside Uranus’s magnetosphere. Titania consists of approximately equal amounts of ice and rock, and is probably differentiated into a rocky core and an icy mantle. A layer of liquid water may be present at the core–mantle boundary. It is covered with numerous impact craters reaching up to 326 kilometres in diameter, but is less heavily cratered than Oberon, outermost of the five large moons of Uranus. Infrared spectroscopy conducted from 2001 to 2005 revealed the presence of water ice as well as frozen carbon dioxide on the surface of Titania, which in turn suggested that the moon may have a tenuous carbon dioxide atmosphere. The Uranian system has been studied up close only once, by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in January 1986. Both northern and southern poles spend 42 years in continuous sunlight, rising to the zenith of the sun at each summer solstice. Because Uranus orbits the Sun almost on its side, its moons orbit in the planet’s equatorial plane, in the plane of its rotational period. Both Titania and Oberon are subject to an extreme seasonal cycle, with one face always pointing toward the planet, and the other toward the other.
The moon’s orbit has a small eccentricity and is inclined very little relative to the equator of UranUS. Its orbital period is around 8. 7 days, coincident with its rotations. Titania’s orbit lies completely inside the Uranian magnetosphere, which co-rotates with the planet. This may lead to the darkening of the trailing hemispheres, which is actually observed for all Uranian moons except Oberon. The name Titania was taken from the Queen of the Fairies in A MIDSummer Night’s Dream. The adjectival form, Titanian, is homonymous with that of Saturn’s moon Titan, meaning ‘Daughter of the Titans’ The name is ancient Greek in origin, meaning \”Daughter of the Titans\”. Titania orbits Uranus at the distance of about 436,000 kilometres, being the second farthest from the planet among its five major moons. It was initially referred to as ‘Uranus I’ by William Lassell, and in 1848 was given the designation Uranus I. In 1851 Lassell eventually numbered all four known satellites in order of their distance from Uranus by Roman numerals, and since then Titania has been designated Uranus III. It can be seen from Earth with a present-day high-end amateur telescope, although the moon can’t be seen with a high-ending amateur telescope. For nearly fifty years following their discovery, Titanias and Ober on would not be observed by any instrument other than William Hersche’s.
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This page is based on the article Titania (moon) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
