Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective

Ophelia (moon)

Moon of Uranus From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ophelia (moon)
Remove ads

Ophelia is a moon of Uranus. It was discovered from the images taken by Voyager 2 on January 20, 1986, and was given the temporary designation S/1986 U 8.[1] It was not seen again until the Hubble Space Telescope recovered it in 2003.[7][9] Ophelia was named after the daughter of Polonius, Ophelia, in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. It is also designated Uranus VII.[10]

Quick facts Discovery, Discovered by ...

Other than its orbit,[4] size of 54 × 38 km,[5] and geometric albedo of 0.065,[7] little is known about it. In images taken by Voyager 2, Ophelia appears as an elongated object, with its major axis pointing towards Uranus. The ratio of axes of the Ophelia's prolate spheroid is 0.7 ± 0.3.[5]

Ophelia acts as the outer shepherd satellite for Uranus's ε ring.[11] The orbit of Ophelia is within the synchronous orbit radius of Uranus, and is therefore slowly decaying due to tidal forces.[5]

Remove ads

See also

Notes

  1. Calculated on the basis of other parameters.

References

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.

Remove ads