These are the forgeries of jealousy. And never since the middle summer's spring met we on a hill in dale forest, or mead by paved fountain, or by rushing brook, or in the beached margin of the sea, to dance our ringlets to the whistling wind. But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport. Therefore the winds piping to us in vain as in revenge, have sucked up from the sea.
Contagious fogs, which falling in the land, have every pelting river made so proud that they have overborne their continents. The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vein. The plowman lost his sweat, and the green corn hath rotted, ere his youth attained a beard. The fold stands empty in the drowned field, and crows are fatted with the murray and flock. The nine men's morris filled up with mud, and the quaint mazes in the wanton green, for lack
of tread, are undistinguishable. The human mortals want their winter here. No night is now with him or Carol blessed. Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger
washes all the air that rheumatic diseases do abound. And thorough this distemperature, we see the seasons alter hoary headed frosts far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, and on old highams than an icy crown, an odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds is as in mockery set the spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter change their wonted liveries, and the mazed world, by their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny
of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension. We are their parents and original.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
I can't believe nine Men's Morris is filled up with mud. It used to be a cool place.
Yeah, I know. So we're back with our third and final part in the series on the moons of the planet Uranus, and I started today with a reading from It's Actually It's a speech given by the character Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now I've read that half just because I loved that speech and I thought it was really cool, but it also seemed to kind of resonant with our
subject matter today. So the speech in the play is delivered by Titania to Oberon of the fairies, describing how the jealous feuding between the two of them has had malicious effects on the weather and the very environment of nature in the human world, because you know, when fairies fight,
it's not just bad vibes. The bad vibes apparently become quite physical, and they take the form of floods, drought, frostbitten winters, famine, disease, etc. And this struck me as interesting in this case because of the ways that hundreds of years ago, the behavior of planets and moons and other objects up in the heavens was thought to affect the weather, and not just affect the weather, but to
produce the bad air that brings plague. So both of the things kind of mentioned in this speech bad weather and disease. And we've talked about numerous specific examples of that in previous episodes, but one being that during the
Second Plague pandemic. In thirteen forty eight, a convocation of scholars from the medical faculty at the University of Paris was assembled by King Philip the sixth of France to determine the cause of the plague, and they concluded it was because of the thirteen forty five conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the House of Aquarius, which had caused evil vapors to rise up from the earth and
breathe death into the cities of humankind. So the idea of this direct causal connection between what the planets are doing, what things in the sky are doing, and then weather on Earth and then disease. And this struck me because in Shakespeare the behavior of Oberon and Titania is thought to change the weather and bring disease. But this was before those characters were also the names of actual heavenly
bodies moons of the planet Uranus. In fact, that would have been before the official discovery of Uranus as a planet at all. But Titania and Oberon are now both major moons of Uranus. Those two were discovered by William Herschel in seventeen eighty seven, the same guy who discovered Urinus as a planet, though curiously I was just reading about this. William Herschel also at the same time reported discovering several other moons that were never confirmed by later astronomers.
So nobody ever found moons matching the orbits of these other couple moons he described. Herschel Apparently, I don't know he wrote something down wrong or something he claimed, you know, he claimed to have found some non existent moons in
addition to these real ones. But anyway, I wonder if if the Uranian moons Oberon and Titania had been known about in Shakespeare's day, they might also, I wonder, have been blamed for making the green corn rot and filling the Nine Men's moriss up with mud and spreading the rheumatic diseases and all that stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Despite all of the shakespeare references in the naming of the Iranian moons, I don't believe Shakespeare ever references the god Uranus or Urinas in his works. Could be a lot wrong about that. I'm not a Shakespeare scholar. I'm just combining memory of Shakespeare with some
searches on some digital databases of his work. All the other gods featured in our planetary lineup are referenced numerous times in his plays, but never never Uranos, and the same seems to be true of Alexander Pope, which I guess this ultimately just speaks to the limited or non existent role Uranas had in literature of the times of these writers.
Right, I guess he's just wasn't one of the flashiest gods, you know. Yeah, yeah, But actually I was just thinking, to come back on what I said a minute ago, you know, wondering if the moons of another planet would have been used in astrological explanations for weather patterns and disease. Now that I think about it, I can't think of a case where, then, at least that I'm familiar with, where the moons of other planets were used to explain
that that. Maybe that's because, like those, moons of other planets had only been known about since the time of Galileo. But as far as I can recall, it's always invoking the outer planets themselves and not their moons, of course, apart from our own moon, which, according again to Titania, is the governess of floods.
Yeah, I love that the governess of floods.
You know, before I had ever seen or read Midsommer Night's Dream and knew Oberon and Titania as characters here before I even knew them as the names of moons of Uranus that I recall, I actually knew them from
a different place. I knew them as part of a spooky chant in a song my dad used to listen to when I was younger, the line you have to imagine this with several voices and a strange dissonant harmony saying Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda, Titanya, Neptune, Titan stars can Frighten, which is of course from the nineteen sixty seven psychedelic space rock anthem Astronomy Domine by Pink Floyd.
I think this song was written by syd Barrett, a song that I think I have to admit is still sort of always looping in the back of my head when I think about space, when I picture the empty landscapes of other planets and moons. It manages to capture a feeling of space that is simultaneously very unsettling but also so inviting, And it really helped me be excited about space before I knew much about it, like seeing it as this realm of mysteries that were thrilling to unveil.
So I'm not saying the effect would be the same with all kids, but for me personally, this weird song by Pink Floyd was a wonderful early science education tool. Not because it contains any actual information or educational content it doesn't, but because it really made me want to know more about what's out there.
So you're saying Astronomy Domine was kind of your Star Wars?
Is that what Star Wars was for you? I mean, I love Star Wars too, I you know, wore out the videotape.
Yeah. I mean when I think back on just earliest idea things that got me excited about space, I think they were mostly you know, space stories, Like I remember really liking the black Hole from Disney, and I had
like a storybook and cassette of the black Hole. Even though, of course, as we've mentioned on the show before and maybe we'll get into again in the future, you know, the black Hole contains very little that you can take to the bank regarding actual information about about this about space and the nature of black holes.
Well, I guess this is part of the song's psychedelic qualities. But yeah, Astronomy domine. I always felt it was. It was scary in the best possible way. It was scary in the way that it's like, you know, you want to know what's behind the door, but you're you're frightened to open it in a way that makes you just you have to look even more.
Hm hm, No, I know, having been hurt, listened to part of this song here, and I'm not super familiar with Pink Floyd. You know, I know the big ones, of course, but I haven't I've never done a deep dive into their discography. Yeah, I see what you're saying about this, this track.
This is early Pink Floyd. Most of the Pink Floyd stuff people know is from a later period of the band where they sound totally different. They're more the kind of you know, I don't know what you call it, progressive classic rock. This is from their early couple of albums that were more weird British psychedelic rock. Okay, all right, But anyway, in the line of lyrics from from the song you Hear you hear three names, it's oberon Miranda in Titanya. So I think we're still taking the moons
somewhat in order. Right. Last in the previous episode, we talked about the the inner moons of Uranus, and now we're going to be talking about the major moons.
That's right, and we'll begin with with Miranda here. Miranda's name for Prospero's daughter in the Tempest. She's also the subject of a pretty famous waterhouse painting. I included this for you, Joe. I don't know, maybe I'm alone in this, but I just remember seeing this one a lot. I feel like this one. There were a lot of posters of this on dorm rooms or something.
I don't know. If I did see it, it didn't really make an impression, but I.
Like it has sort of Gothic sensibility to it. I don't think I've ever seen the actual painting. I'm not sure where it is at any rate. It was discovered by Gerald P. Kiper on February sixteenth, nineteen forty eight, at the McDonald Observatory in Texas. It was the last moon of the planet to be discovered prior to Voyager two, the smallest and closest to the planet of the pre
Voyager two discovered moons of Uranus. Now, the composition here, like all the larger moons, it's thought to consist mostly of a roughly equal mix of water, ice and silicate rock. The significance it is, I've seen numerous descriptions referring to it as a Frankenstein moon, which of course instantly sounds pretty jazzy Frankenstein moon of seemingly mismatched landscapes and featuring Titanic canyons thought to be twelve times as deep as
the Grand Canyon of Earth. In some cases, its surface also bears the mark of coroni, which are sound delicious what they're found to be. They're found on the surface of Venus as well. These like oval shaped geological markings caused by upwellings of subsurface warm material. So Miranda is known to or as thought to have frozen water ice on its surface, and the corona here may have caused warm ice rising to cause tectonic faults in the rock here.
So you mentioned it has this peculiar, fascinating outer appearance. I add a couple of I added a couple of photos here to the outlines, so we could rub the fur a bit to look at the different textures on Miranda across much of the known surface, it does look a lot like our moon, Like you can see sort of swaths of landscape of rocks and soil, you know, the very familiar looking dotted with that kind of fractal
vanishing pattern of craters. But then across some stretches of the Moon's surface, it looks like a bear about the size of the Sun, just like dug its claws in and used it as a scratching post. Something absolutely tore up the crust of this planet.
Now, you know, part of this is I'm primed by being described as the Frankenstein Moon, but also looking at these images of it, it makes me think of this moon as a mad ball, which I don't think. I'm well, they were apparently still around. I think they started in the mid eighties and they were a toy when I was a kid. But they're like these bouncy balls that have these like textured monster heads, like ones of cyclops, ones like a meducer or something.
And I just looked it up. Yeah, okay, I think I've seen these.
Yeah, So it's kind of like if you're familiar with these, and I think they're still around. They have a website, so I think you can probably buy him somewhere. Maybe they're not the hot thing with kids these days, But at any rate, I look at this moon and I think of mad balls.
So I'm looking at an arrangement of six mad balls, and five of them are some kind of monster I don't know, like a like a one eyed, one horned, purple people eater of some sort. And then but one of them is just a baseball with an angry face. It's just a baseball. Why do they got to put a baseball in there? Even got the little seams with the red thread, and I don't know, just.
An angry baseball. I monster baseball.
I see what you're talking about, though. Yet, yes, it is kind of like a mad ball. It has very the different mismatched parts. It looks like it could be you know, illustrated scarring or something. I don't know. It's just like a hugely variable, strange surface. So there I mentioned the parts. Some just look kind of like any moon you might imagine. Some look like the parts where
the bear dug its claws in. Other parts look to me like you've ever seen the you know, those little zin gardens people have where they are like soft patterns of parallel lines and raked into the sand. Yeah, yeah, there are parts of the surface that look like that. Here you see these little kind of I'm not implying that they were left there by an actual being, but yeah, it looks like just kind of parallel lines gently raked
into the surface, but of course with massive proportions. And there are some places that show jagged ruptures and protrusions off of the Moon's surface that are really just scraping space, Like you can really see like a kind of a point coming off of there. Rob you mentioned that some of the canyons on Miranda are thought to be twelve times as deep as the Grand Canyon on Earth. I wanted to zoom in on one particular feature that I
found very interesting. Let's go to the Verona rupus. Verona is I believe here a reference to Romeo and Juliet, because again the Shakespeare name of Urines's moons, and so Romeo and Juliet is set in the Italian city of Verona. Meanwhile, Verona rupus Rupus is a word used in planetary geology to refer to extraterrestrial escarpments or cliffs. It's the Latin word for cliff, so Raba included a photo for you
to look at of Verona rupas zoomed in. This is an image that was featured by NASA and Michigan Tech's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, and this photograph was taken by No Surprise Voyager two, as all these close up photos of Uranes's moons are. But what's really interesting here is that you can see in the picture this massive feature is not a gently sloping mountain side, but a steep sheer cliff. And what you can't tell from the picture is the scale of this massive landscape feature.
According to the APOD write up, the drop from Verona Rupus is thought to be about twenty kilometers deep. Now I've seen other estimates somewhere. I don't know exactly who's the final authority on estimating the heights of features like this from photos, but twenty kilometers is the estimate given here. And for a point of comparison, they say that this is in this case ten times the depth of the Grand Canyon. For another one, I just looked up the
height of Mount Everest. That's about eight point eight kilometers in height, so imagine a drop off more than double the peak to ground height of Everest. But it's not a slope, it's a cliff. It's a vertical cliff.
Wow, that's incredible.
I'm imagining the cull devoid kind of thought patterns that looking at a cliff of that size. Man, if you're somebody with like kriminophobia, you know, you get afraid of sharp drop offs. I don't know, you can't even process it. But another thing they point out is that, so you imagine a future astronaut is somehow on the surface of Miranda and maybe they are suddenly they're cursed by Oberon and Titania, you know, the fairy magic falls upon them,
and they are made to jump the cliff. This source estimates that it would take them about twelve minutes to fall to the bottom, though the length of that fall is somewhat stretched out because Miranda has relatively very low gravity compared to Earth. But despite the lower gravity, the fall would probably still probably would still hurt you.
I mean, I guess in the future, extreme base jumpers might venture there in their robot avatar bodies and take a leap off, and in that case, I guess you survive the fall because you're just back in your actual body at the end of it. Yeah, always safety precautions though, just a heap of robots to the bottom though, just smashed down to a thin sheet.
So what causes this chaotic patch landscape? There are a couple of hypotheses. One appears to be the idea of collisions. Basically that Miranda was actually somewhat smashed to pieces by collision with a large object. But these pieces did not you know, fly off into deep space. They were still caught in orbit around Uranus, and they were ultimately attracted to each other by gravity and reformed into a moon
once again. But then you'd have the different pieces sort of fitting together weirdly, explaining the patchy surface.
Yeah, so a Miranda is a mess, but potentially she's a work in progress.
Yes, And if that were indeed the case, that sort of reminds me of the whole thing about like why planetary defense concepts, you know, like protecting Earth from comets and asteroids don't tend to focus on trying to blow
up incoming asteroids. So you got an asteroid that's coming toward Earth, you don't want to like, you know, nuke its core and smash it to a million pieces, like in you know, movies like Armageddon or something thing, Because fragmenting it into pieces, it potentially would just still hit earth anyway, like the pieces would hit Earth, or it might be gravitationally attracted to itself reform and still hit Earth. So instead the better plan is to deflect its path.
You want to blow it off course, not blow it up.
Yeah, nudget, nudget a little bit. Make sure it just gradually goes off course far enough ahead of the entering any kind of danger zone.
But another possible explanation for the weird mismatched surface of Miranda is a not a collision and a reforming together, but instead is like that Miranda is struck by like
large rocky objects or meteorites of some kind. These impacts partially melt the ice that is underneath the surface of Miranda, and then that melting from the heat of the impact causes water to rise to the surface, icy water to come up to the surface, and then it refreezes somewhat chaos, giving rise to these strange patterns of different types of surface texture.
Well, however, it comes together. Definitely worth pulling up an image of this so you'll see what we're talking about here. Because it's uh visually, it's I think one of, if not the most notable of the Uranian moons. All right, let's move on to the next one. The next one is Arial and this one, this one pulls double duty because it is a spirit who serves Prospero in the tempest, but it is also a sylph or a sylphid from
Alexander Pope's the Rape of the Lock. This is like like an invisible air elemental being that is brought up in the works of Paracelsus.
Oh that's interesting.
Yeah, So anyway, double duty this one. This one's in both camps of Pope and Shakespeare. Discovered by English astronomer William Lassel in eighteen fifty one. The composition, you know, same as Miranda and other larger moons, but carbon dioxide has also been detected. And the significance here it's tidally locked like our moon, youngest surface of the moons of Uranus and the most recent geologically active, So.
Like Earth and its moon, if you were able to stand on the surface of Uranus and look up at Ariel, I mean you can't stand on the surface of Uranus, but if you were to look up at Ariel, you would always see the same side of it facing the planet right. So, to invoke another Pink Floyd reference there, there would not actually be a permanent dark side of the Moon on aerial, but there would be an always facing away side of the Moon, the far side, all right.
Moving on to the next one, Umbriel, also discovered by William Lassel in eighteen fifty one. This one is named after an evil spirit in Alexander Pope's poem Rape of the Lock. Significance here it has a mysterious ring on its surface, revealed by Voyager two, which might be due to frost deposits from an impact crater. It's ancient and dark, as the shadowy name suggests. Just a couple of quick
quotes here from the poem by Pope. First, Umbriel a dusky, melancholy sprite as ever sullied the fair face of light. And then later on there's another nice little snippet here, but Umbriel hateful gnome forbears not so he breaks the vial, whence the sorrows flow? Hateful? No I like it.
Well, you know the name is fitting because so it mentions. He's the enemy of light basically, and that's also true if you look up about Umbriel the moon. Because Umbriel is the darkest of all of Uranus's major moons, it reflects very little light. You mentioned that bright ring a minute ago, the kind of mysterious bright ring in a crater. I added a photo of this for you to look at here. I think it's interesting. So the contrast with
the glowing white ring is quite profound. That I guess that seems especially true because Umbriel is the darkest of the major moons. And unfortunately the images we have from Voyager two do not capture the ring looking down, so you're not looking at it head on. Instead, we see we can just barely tell it's a ring, but we can see it at sort of the edge of the hemisphere that Voyager two was able to photograph, so it's right there on the cusp of the planet like a
little halo. The Moon as a whole is about twelve hundred kilometers in diameter, and the white ring here is about one hundred and forty kilometers itself, so more than ten percent of the width of the Moon. And scientists are not sure what caused the ring to appear. But
Rob you mentioned the frost deposits. In the last part of the series, I referenced an article by the planetary scientist Amy Simon, and she explains a little further in that article that it might be like a layer of ice on a crater floor that is lying exposed to the sunlight. For some reason, something knocked the what might have otherwise been covering it off, so it's exposed and
reflecting much more light than the surface around it. But this tickled something in my memory, and I realized it was reminding me of when we discussed the bright white spot in the center of a crater on another object in the Solar System, on the dwarf planet Series. So Series is not a planet on its own, it is the largest object in the asteroid belt, the biggest asteroid
known as a dwarf planet. And on the surface of Series there are actually a number of different bright spots known as facue and there's one I've got you here to look at, rob So it's in the middle of a crater. The crater is called the Okat Crater, and the bright spot, this is the most famous of the bright tipots, is known as the Cerealia facula. So it's right there in the middle of the crater almost like a I don't know what to call it. It's just like,
you know, it's like a bull's eye. It's a bright dot in the middle of this depression in the surface of CeREES And these bright spots are thought to be caused, in this case on series by the presence of ice
or salts rising to the surface from below. So there might be there's like sort of a mantle or a subsurface layer of briny solution kind of water with salts in it, and maybe some kind of impact caused that that stuff to well up, so the water the salts came up, and then the ice that's there or the salts that are left once the water is gone, leave this area of higher reflectivity than the surrounding surface. So it forms this little you know, bull's eye in the middle of the crater.
Interesting. Yeah. Now, now as for just the ring on umbrel, it's also and it also makes me think of like an intentional bald spot at the top of the head, like a monk's conture, you know.
Oh yeah, yeah, I can see that it's just sitting right up there. Yeah.
Yeah.
But we spoke earlier of the Fairy Royalty Titanya and Oberon. Should we set them a bickering Yeah yeah.
Next up is Titania, the queen of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the namesake discovered by William Herschel this moon in seventeen eighty seven. It's the largest moon of Uranus, with a diameter of roughly one thousand miles or sixteen one hundred kilometers. Voyager two images revealed that it was at some point geologically active. Reflective material, possibly frost, adheres to sun facing valley walls. And then
we have Oberon. Oberon is named for the king of the Fairies and midsummer Night's Dream, also discovered by William Herschel in seventeen eighty seven. It's the second largest moon of Uranus. It's heavily cratered and has at least one large mountain. This large mountain towers I believes six kilometers and is named but is sometimes called the Limb Mountain. The outmost of the major moons is over On. Many of its craters have an unidentified dark material in them.
That was something else mentioned in that Amy Simon article that a lot of the moons of Uranus have substances on their surface which cause darkening, and it's not known exactly what that is.
Yeah. Now, another interesting note about some of these moons we just discussed here is the potential the possible potential for life on the major moons of Urinus. Life on Uranus itself seems extremely unlikely based on everything I've been looking at life as we know it anyway, because is always the caveat. For instance, just one case of this, the long standing risk of contaminating Uranus or Neptune with terrestrial microbes seems to be essentially nil. Based on scientific
opinions NASA and so forth. It is, by most estimates, likely a dead world. Now, I did run across a nineteen eighty eight paper by ing Bolshkarov in Bioastronomy titled in the bio Astronomy Next Steps My bad there it's titled is Urinus the most promising planet for SETI? This paper seems to mostly focus on the presence of water drops and electrical discharges in the planet's atmosphere as a possible precursor to life. Still, most sources seem to say no, Uranus is a no go for life as we know it.
You know, there are other places that we can look to in our Solar system that are far better candidates for exploration. But any right, the idea of it being a dead world. We can't say the same for the moons. We can't say the same for all of the Uranian moons.
I like how the title of the paper though, is not just like is it worth looking at Urinus for SETI, it's saying is it the most promising planet? That seems like the answer is no, No, it's not.
It's interesting, you know, we often have to think back to you know, the reality of putting missions together for these various various moons and planets. It's like you've got to really build up the hype, you know, you've got to you got to make the case why is this worth all of this money, this time, this investment. And you know, there's a strong case to be made for any destination in our Solar system to you know, to broaden our understanding of the world surrounding our star. But
you know, you got to make that case. You got to believe, and maybe maybe you got to You got to push a little hard.
Well, yeah, and even if you're looking at places that are not themselves at least as far as we can tell very good candidates for discovering life, they can still usually teach you a lot about the dynamics and life history of planets in general, which is something that we do need to always understand better if we want to know where best to look for life. Yeah.
Yeah, So the most recent paper that I was running across about Uranian moons in life. This comes from a December twenty twenty two paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research by Castillo Roguez at All. They point out that Titania, Oberon, Aerial, and Umbrial may have salty oceans beneath their frozen surfaces, opening up the possibility for life as we know it. They base their findings on three factors. First, fall observational
constraints about each moon's internal and geological evolution. Secondly, the current level of tidal heating, and third thermal models. They write, quote, we predict that if the Moon's preserved liquid until present, it is likely in the form of residual oceans less than thirty kilometers thick on Aerial, Umbrial and less than fifty kilometers in Titania and Oberon. Now, they stress that liquid preservation depends on a number of factors, and ultimately
we just can't know for certain until we look closer. Miranda, however, they say, is unlikely to boast any water unless there was some manner of tidal heating there quote a few tens of millions of years ago. They also point out that thermal metamorphism could create a late second generation ocean in Titania and Oberon. In either case, It's also possible that liquid on these moons, if present, is preserved by anti freeze in the form of something like ammonia and chlorides.
The downside to this possibility, they stress, is that the electrical conductiveness may be close to zero in such waters if they're there, making it impossible for future probes to detect them via magnetic field generation. Also, we'd be talking about temperatures close to the lower limit for metabolic activity and terrestrial microbe reproduction based on life as we know it, so the author's stress that it might not really be
a high priority liquid environment for astrobiologists. It's no Enceladus that seems to remain the most interesting lunar ocean for astrobiologists, but we can't rule out life on the Uranian moons more research, more inquiry is required.
Always Enceladus now considered a better candidate than Europa. I would have assumed Europa was still on top. I guess I don't really know.
Well, I don't want to get into the beef between Enceladus and Europa, but okay, either of these, it's my understanding, would would ultimately be better placed if you had to place hard bets on it, which essentially you are if you're deciding to, you know, potentially launch any kind of like a mission, fly by probe, et cetera. So yeah, that seemed to be the basic take home from the paper is that, like, there's a possibility it's not, but
it's not. Maybe the they're not the best odds of the moons in our solar system.
Maybe not, But wouldn't that be a good surprise. You look at all of the higher tier candidates, Europa and Enceladus, whatever, and nothing's there but way out in the ice giants, those moons are cranking with life.
Yeah, I mean, it's always in the last place you look, right.
All right, Miranda, Umbriel, Titanya, and Oberon. Those are the four major moons. But that doesn't exhaust the list, right, we've got a bunch of so called irregular moons and other stuff going on.
Yeah, yeah, we're gonna venture into the outskirts here, Like we're leaving Las Vegas proper and we're down into the area surround in Vegas. We're getting into the irregular moons of Uranus. According to NASA, the composition of the moons outside the orbit of Oberon remains largely unknown, but they are likely captured asteroids. These are all positioned far beyond the orbit of Oberon, and there are nine known irregular moons of Uranus. All right, we're gonna start with Francisco.
This is named after a shipwrecked nobleman in the Tempest, discovered in two thousand and one by Cavalleras at All at Chile Sero Tololo Inter American Observatory. It has a retrograde orbit. It is the innermost of the irregular moons, but it orbits at about four point three million kilometers from the planet itself.
I do not recall what the character Francisco and the Tempest does, but you know who I do recall is Caliban.
Yeah, the sort of a monstrous character from the Tempest who was also the inspiration for the character Calibos in the movie Clash of the Titans, which we discussed in Weird House Cinema.
A little bit of crossing of the streams there. I got your Shakespeare in my Greek mythology.
Yeah. So this one was discovered by Gladman at All in nineteen ninety seven at the Palomar Observatory in California. Significance here it has a retrogade orbit that is also inclined and eccentric, thought to be the second largest irregular moon. It is also far out and likely an independent body captured by the planet's gravity. All right, Up next we have Stefano. This is named after King Alonzo's butler in
The Tempest. It's been a while since I've actually seen The Tempest or certainly read it, so I don't remember the significance of King Alzo's butler.
I also have no memory of what's going on with the butler. Yeah.
At any rate, he gets a mon named after him. Discovered in nineteen ninety nine by Gladman at All at the Canada, France Hawaii Telescope at the Monachia Observatory on the island of Hawaii. They discovered Stefano, Prospero, and Setebas at the same time. Significance here basically just retrograde orbit similar in composition to Caliban, is.
Likely, all right.
Next we have Trinculo, named after the jester from The Tempest.
Mm hmm.
Yeah. This one discovered by Holman at All in two thousand and one at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Canada using the Sero Tololo Interamerican Observatory in Chile. This one has a retrograde orbit, all right, all right. The next one is Psychoax. This is named after the which mother of Caliban in The Tempest. This is an off screen character though that dies before the play, so it's just
like a name drop. Discovered by Gladman at All in nineteen ninety seven at the Palomar Observatory in California, discovered at the same time as Caliban, thus the naming the main significance here. It's the largest of the irregular moons and it also has a retrograde orbit. Now it's hard to beat that name. That's a cool name, so the next one doesn't even try. The next one is Margaret.
This is named after a character from much Ado about nothing discovered by Scott S. Shepherd and David C. Juleet In with the Subaru eight point two millimeter reflector at the Monarchy Observatory in two thousand and three. The significance here we have a pro grade orbit for once.
Oh is this the first one of the irregulars?
Yeah? Yeah, they're all retrograde thus far. Okay, now the next one, this one has as a pretty We've mentioned him already. But finally we have a moon named after Prospero, the sorcerer from the Tempest.
I know this isn't true, but I'm going to tell myself that it's actually named after Prospero, the Vincent Price character in the Mask of the Red Death.
Ah. Now here's an interesting little side bit. You know we discussed or this. I believe this was Christian and I that did much older episode about the Elizabethan poly math and occultist John D. There's this this theory that the historic individual of John D may have been partial inspiration for Shakespeare's Prospero, and he also seems to have influenced John D that seems to have influenced our ideas concerning Merlin as well, and ultimately, like the Fantasy Wizard character as a whole.
That seems true to me, though it doesn't exactly match, because the Fantasy Wizard character does not get obsessed with trying to talk to angels.
Yeah yeah, yeah. Dee's full story has a lot of strange turns in it, and you know, he gets caught up in some in a few messes. Interestingly, his occult interests include the angel Uriel, the supposed to be the angel of Wisdom, who's said in some cases to have worn Noah of the flood and revealed astrological secrets of the stars and planets. To Enoch, Uriel is synonymous with Aeriel,
which we already discussed as a major Uranian moon. Interesting now, Prospero, the Uranian moon setting all that aside, is just discovered by Gladman at All in nineteen ninety nine at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope at Monarchy Observatory Nowland of Hawaii. They and again they also discovered Stefano, Prospero, and Setebos at the same time. It has a retrograde orbit. Orbital details suggests it shares common origin with Serrax and Setibas,
but its gray colorations suggest otherwise. So it's from what I was looking at it sounds like there's still some you know, some unknowns about.
It for sure.
Now I personally found it kind of amusing, you know, looking back again at the Shakespeare, it's amusing to see that Prospero in the Tempest mentions moons and the god Neptune, but of course not Uranus, obviously not the planet, but also not the god. But there is this wonderful little bit here that I wanted to read. Prospero says, ye elves of hills brooks, standing lakes and groves, and ye that on the sands with printless foot, do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him when he comes back.
You dimmy puppets, that by moonshine, do the green sour ringlets make where all the u not bites. And you whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice to hear the solemn curfew, by whose aid week masters, though ye be I have bedimmed.
Speak for yourself. I don't make midnight mushrooms. You know. I'm struck. How often if you look at a passage from Shakespeare that is a reference to a I don't know, a fairy or magical creature or someone doing sorcery. The language employed could easily pass for lyrics to space Rock of later centuries.
Yeah, all right, the next one is setibas we have to already. The Shakespearean connection is that Cigarax and Caliban are said to worship said it Boss in the Tempest. But the name was prior to this, it seems, the name of an actual Patagonian god. I was reading up
on this a little bit. Shakespeare apparently took the name from Richard Eden's sixteenth century accounts of Magellan's experiences with Patagonian natives, which, of course we always have to take an enormous grain of salt in such accounts, you know, concerning some of the finer details of people's beliefs and practices.
But this according to a work I was looking at by Charles Frey titled The Tempest in the New World, getting into these various connections between Shakespeare's The Tempest and information that was coming out of exploration of the New World of the Americas. In Eden's work, he writes of natives who quote cried upon the great devil Boss to help them again, you know, the grain of salt, to say the least, concerning some of these accounts of other
peoples and cultures and their practices. Also, poet Robert Browning would later write a poem inspired by the Tempest Caliban upon Setibas. Also of note, the giant Antarctic octopus is classified as megalodone Setiboss, which I thought was interesting. But anyway, Setibas the moon discovered by Gladman at All in nineteen
ninety nine. Again this was the Canada, France Hawaii Telescope, and again they discovered the Stefano, Prospero and Setibas at the same time, retrograde orbit one of the farthest moons more than eleven million miles or seventeen million kilometers out.
Well, I guess that about does it for our trip to Uranus and exploration of the moons.
Yeah, yeah, it's been fun. Most of these I really wasn't that familiar with. And again this is unlike the Jupiter and Saturn. We actually could take time to go through them blow by blow, even if there's not much to know about them currently, you know, given our current knowledge of the Uranian satellite system. But still pretty fun to explore I also enjoyed looking into some of the namesakes, because yeah, there's some Shakespeare plays. I'm more up on
some of these. Even like Midsummer Night's Dream, I feel like I like intentionally didn't learn much about it in school, like I thought I was. I thought I was too cool and dark for Midsummer Night's Dream. I was like, you know, give me, I gotta have Macbeth. I can't an my time for Midsummer Night's Stream. So you know, I ultimately cheated myself out of out of some goodness there.
Well, I'm still reeling from the way you discouraged Margaret, and I won't have you speak that way about the irregular moon Margaret. In fact, who are you to say Margaret is irregular? I demand satisfaction.
We'll see about upgrading her, see if we can make her a regular moon. Yeah, all right, Well, we're going to go and close this episode out here. Let us know what you think. If you have thoughts about you know, there's any of the the actual planetary lunar stuff that we've discussed in these episodes, or if you lean the other way and you have stuff you want to add about the mythological or literary inspirations for the various namings
of the Uranian moons. So yeah, right in about that, we'd love to hear from you and if you want us to keep going. If you were like, yes, let's get to Neptune and talk about the moons of Neptune, let's do it sooner rather than later, let us know. Or if you are like, well, I want to go to Neptune, but I think you should wait a year or two like you've been doing between lunar episodes, then
that's fair too. Either way, let us know. Just a reminder that core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind publishing the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yeah, they are primarily a science podcast, and that's where you'll find those core science episodes. On Mondays we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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