Episode 2729
Umbriel
Wed, 2024-Nov-06 00:30 UTC
Length - 2:03
Direct Link
Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.
The featured article for Thursday, 24 October 2024 is Umbriel.
Umbriel () is the third-largest moon of Uranus. It was discovered on October 24, 1851, by William Lassell at the same time as neighboring moon Ariel. It was named after a character in Alexander Pope's 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock. Umbriel consists mainly of ice with a substantial fraction of rock, and may be differentiated into a rocky core and an icy mantle. The surface is the darkest among Uranian moons, and appears to have been shaped primarily by impacts, but the presence of canyons suggests early internal processes, and the moon may have undergone an early endogenically driven resurfacing event that obliterated its older surface.
Covered by numerous impact craters reaching 210 km (130 mi) in diameter, Umbriel is the second-most heavily cratered satellite of Uranus after Oberon. The most prominent surface feature is a ring of bright material on the floor of Wunda crater. This moon, like all regular moons of Uranus, probably formed from an accretion disk that surrounded the planet just after its formation. Umbriel has been studied up close only once, by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in January 1986. It took several images of Umbriel, which allowed mapping of about 40% of the moon's surface.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:30 UTC on Wednesday, 6 November 2024.
For the full current version of the article, see Umbriel on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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Until next time, I'm long-form Gregory.
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