How far away is Uranus right now?

2,774,438,162

kilometres · Uranus's distance from Earth

About 18 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
An airliner at cruising speed would take 349 years to cover it.

Right now Uranus is up all night: it rises around sunset and sets around sunrise. Binoculars help: it is only just bright enough to see.

Right now Uranus is about 2.8 billion kilometres from Earth, and the gap changes every second. A radio message, moving at the speed of light, needs 2.6 hours to cross it.

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, an ice giant that rolls round it on its side. Its distance from us swings between 2.6 billion and 3.2 billion kilometres. The next close approach is on 25 November 2026.

Time until Uranus's next close approach to Earth

25 d 19 h 45 m 58 s

Measured

Temperature of Uranus at the 1 bar level

-197 °C

Measured, with error

Time since Uranus was discovered

245 y 229 d 20 h

Measured

Time since Voyager 2 flew past Uranus

40 y 279 d 8 h

Measured

What is Uranus?

An ice giant

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It circles about 19 times as far out as Earth does.

It is a giant, but a different kind from Jupiter and Saturn. Most of Uranus is a hot, dense fluid of water, methane and ammonia, which scientists call ices. Above it lies a deep atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. There is no solid ground near the top, and a spacecraft would have nowhere to land. That is why Uranus is called an ice giant.

It is about 4 times as wide as Earth, and about 64 Earths would fit inside it. Its mass is only about 15 times ours, so on average it is far less dense than our world.

A little methane in its air soaks up the red part of sunlight. What comes back to us is blue-green.

William Herschel found Uranus on 13 March 1781. He first took it for a comet. It was the first planet ever discovered with a telescope.

51,118 kmEquatorial diameter of Uranus

The next close approach

Why the distance keeps changing

Earth and Uranus both circle the Sun, like runners on a track. Earth runs fast on an inside lane. Uranus is far out on the edge and moves slowly: one lap takes it about 84 Earth years.

So Earth keeps catching up and passing it. Each time, Earth lies between the Sun and Uranus, and the two planets are as close as they get. Astronomers call this line-up an opposition. Half a year later Uranus is beyond the Sun, and the gap has grown by roughly the width of Earth's own orbit.

Uranus has moved on a little in the meantime, so Earth needs a few extra days to catch it. The meetings come about every 370 days, a few days later in the calendar each year. The clock on this page counts down to the next one, on 25 November 2026.

Uranus's own path is a slight oval, and it is moving towards its nearest point to the Sun. So until about 2051, each meeting with Earth is a little closer than the one before.

25 d 19 h 45 m 58 sTime until Uranus's next close approach to Earth

Right now

A hello that takes hours

Radio waves are a kind of light, and nothing travels faster. Even so, a message to Uranus needs 2.6 hours at today's distance, and a reply as long again. Sunlight itself takes 2.7 hours to get there from the Sun.

Only one spacecraft has ever made that call from up close. Voyager 2 flew past Uranus on 24 January 1986. In its pictures the planet looked calm and hazy, with only a few clouds. It found new moons and new rings, and a magnetic field tipped far over from the planet's spin.

No spacecraft has been back since. Telescopes have kept watching, though. As Uranus's slow seasons turn, they see bright clouds form and change on a world that looked calm in 1986.

2,774,438,161 kmUranus's distance from Earth

One season

A planet on its side

Most planets spin more or less upright, like tops. Uranus is tipped right over. Its spin axis lies almost flat along its path, so it rolls round the Sun like a ball. NASA says a collision with an Earth-sized body, long ago, may have knocked it over.

That tilt gives Uranus the most extreme seasons of any planet. One Uranus year lasts about 84 Earth years, so each season lasts about 21 years. For much of that time the Sun shines down on one pole. Much of the other half of the planet sits in a long, dark winter.

A child born there at the start of that winter would be an adult before the Sun came back.

Uranus also spins the opposite way to most planets; only Venus shares that. One turn takes 17 h 14 m 24 s. So a single Uranus year holds about 43,000 of its days.

21.0 yearsAverage length of one season on Uranus (a quarter of its year)

Where the air presses like ours

The cold

Uranus has no surface to stand on, so where do we take its temperature? Scientists choose the height where its air presses as hard as ours does at sea level. There it is about -197 °C. Earth's average is 15 °C.

Higher up it is colder still. NASA gives the lowest temperature in Uranus's air as -224 °C. In places that makes it colder than Neptune, though Neptune is much farther from the Sun.

Deep inside, the opposite is true. Near its small rocky core, NASA says, the ices are heated to thousands of degrees.

We have seen this world of extremes up close only once. In 2022 the US National Academies named an orbiter and probe for Uranus as the top large mission for the decade ahead.