At 

Uranus’s distance from the Sun, the planet takes slightly more than

84 Earth years, essentially an entire human life span, to complete one
orbit. The eccentricity of its orbit is low—that is, its orbit deviates little
from a perfect circle—and the inclination of the orbit to the ecliptic—
the plane of Earth’s orbit and nearly the plane of the solar system in
general—is less than 1°. Low orbital eccentricity and inclination are
characteristic of the planets of the solar system, with the notable
exceptions of Mercury and Pluto. Scientists believe that collisions and
gaseous drag removed energy from the orbits while the planets were
forming and so reduced the eccentricities and inclinations to their
present values. Thus, Uranus formed with the other planets soon after
the birth of the Sun nearly 4.6 billion years ago (see solar system:
Origin of the solar system).

Uranus and its neighbour Neptune, the next planet outward from the
Sun, are nearly twins in size. Measured at the level of the atmosphere
at which the pressure is one bar (equivalent to Earth’s sea-level
pressure), Uranus’s equatorial radius of 25,559 km (15,882 miles) is
3.2 percent greater than that of Neptune. But Uranus has only 85
percent the mass of Neptune and thus is significantly less dense. The
difference in their bulk densities—1.285 and 1.64 grams per cubic cm,
respectively—reveals a fundamental difference in composition and
internal structure. Although Uranus and Neptune are significantly
larger than the terrestrial planets, their radii are less than half those of
the largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn. For additional orbital and
physical data about Uranus, see the table.

Because Uranus’s spin axis is not perfectly parallel to the ecliptic, one
of its poles is directed above the ecliptic and the other below it. (The
terms above and below refer to the same sides of the ecliptic as Earth’s
North and South poles, respectively.) According to international
convention, the north pole of a planet is defined as the pole that is
above the ecliptic regardless of the direction in which the planet is
spinning. In terms of this definition, Uranus spins clockwise, or in a
retrograde fashion, about its north pole, which is opposite to the
prograde spin of Earth and most of the other planets. When Voyager 2
flew by Uranus in 1986, the north pole was in darkness, and the Sun
was almost directly overhead at the south pole. In 42 years, or one-half
the Uranian year, the Sun will have moved to a position nearly
overhead at the north pole. The prevailing theory is that the severe tilt
arose during the final stages of planetary accretion when bodies
comparable in size to the present planets collided in a series of violent
events that knocked Uranus on its side. An alternate theory is that a
Mars-sized moon, orbiting Uranus in a direction opposite to the
planet’s spin, eventually crashed into the planet and knocked it on its
side.

Uranus’s rotation period of 17.24 hours was inferred when Voyager 2

detected radio wave emissions with that period coming from charged
particles trapped in the planet’s magnetic field. Subsequent direct
measurements of the field showed that it is tilted at an angle of 58.6°
relative to the rotation axis and that it turns with the same 17.24-hour
period. Because the field is thought to be generated in the electrically