Exactly how many moons does Uranus have?

Question

and which are named after charachters from Alexander Pope as opposed to Shakespearian characters?

TIA...

Answer 1

27

Answer 2

There are currently 27 known moons, 21 named and 6 unnamed.  You can go here to find out more about them:

http://www.nineplanets.org/uranus.html

O.K. , let the bad jokes flow..... ;)

Answer 3

Uranus has twenty-seven named moons. Five of them are massive enough to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium and so would be considered dwarf planets if they were in orbit about the Sun.

The first two moons to be discovered, Titania and Oberon, were spotted by William Herschel on March 13, 1787. Two more, Ariel and Umbriel, were discovered by William Lassell in 1851. In 1852, Herschel's son John Herschel gave the four then-known moons their names. In 1948 Gerard Kuiper discovered the fifth and last large moon, Miranda.

The flyby of the Voyager 2 space probe in January 1986 led to the discovery of a further 10 inner moons, and another satellite Perdita was later found after studying old Voyager photographs. Two more small inner moons were discovered by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope. Until 1997, Uranus was the only giant planet with no known irregular satellites. Since then, nine distant irregular moons have been identified using ground-based telescopes.

The region between the main rings and Miranda appears to be very crowded. The small moons there are constantly perturbed by each other. The system is chaotic and apparently unstable, and simulations show that the moons may perturb each other into crossing orbits which may result in collisions between the moons. Desdemona may collide with either Cressida or Juliet within the next 100 million years.

Unlike most planetary moons, which are named from antiquity, all the moons of Uranus are named after characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope's work The Rape of the Lock.