Michael Brightmore

Well, if I can just demonstrate, using this little prop.

When the solar system was formed, it was formed from this great big disk of dust and gas.

So everything in the solar system, when this dust and gas solidified into the rocky planets and the gas giants and the ice giants, everything was perpendicular to the plane that the planets eventually orbited in.

So Uranus would have started out like this, you know, as did the Earth and all the other planets.

At some stage in the distant past, and probably soon after his formation, something hit Uranus, and from going like that, it ended up with an axial tilt of about 98 degrees.

So it's now revolving like that.

And of course, it's often described as rolling around the Sun, and that's what it does all the way around the Sun.

The Earth doesn't have quite so pronounced an axial tilt, it's just 23 and a half degrees.

So the Earth is going around like that, whereas Uranus is just over 90 degrees and it's actually rotating about its axis in that way.

You know, this is very unusual and it leads to, you know, a lot of considerations about its weather.

The Earth's seasons and weather are all based on our axial tilt.

You know, sometimes the northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun.

That's our summer in the northern hemisphere and the winter in the southern hemisphere.

You know, and as it goes round, we go past the equinox, where it's neither tilted towards or away from the sun.

And then back round the sun to winter, where the northern hemisphere is away from the sun.

That's our northern hemisphere winter and the southern hemisphere winter.

But it makes you wonder what on Earth the weather would be like on Uranus that's tilted with often its axis pointing towards the Sun.

It takes 84 years for Uranus to actually orbit all the way around the Sun and back, whereas the Earth does that in just one year.

So, for a lot of that orbit, its axis and its North Pole is pointing directly towards the Sun.

And the equatorial regions are getting very little Sun.