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Oberon
Oberon, outermost of the five major moons ofUranus and the second largest of the group. Oberon was discovered in 1787 by the English astronomerWilliam Herschel, who had found Uranus in 1781; it was named by William’s son,John Herschel, for a character inWilliam Shakespeare’s playA Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The mean distance of Oberon from the center of Uranus is about 583,500 km (362,570 miles), and its orbital period is 13.463 Earth days. Like all of Uranus’s large moons, Oberon rotates synchronously with its orbital period, keeping the same hemisphere toward the planet and the same hemisphere forward in its orbit. The moon has adiameter of nearly 1,523 km (946 miles) and adensity of 1.63 grams per cubic cm. Like its three large siblings,Ariel,Umbriel, andTitania, Oberon is thought to consist of about halfwaterice, with the remainder made of rocky material and perhaps a small proportion of other frozen volatile materials.
Oberon is one of the most heavily cratered of Uranus’s major moons, which may indicate that it is one of the planet’s oldest satellites. Its numerous craters are named after characters fromWilliam Shakespeare’s plays, with the largest known crater,Hamlet, measuring 206 km (128 miles) across, followed byMacbeth at 203 km (126 miles).
Photographic imagestransmitted by the U.S.Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew past the Uranian system in 1986 revealed that Oberon’s surface is old and heavily cratered like the highlands of Earth’sMoon. A few of the numerous bright craters appear to have been flooded by some kind of dark material that upwelled from the moon’s interior.
