Herschel discovers Uranus
The solar system gains a planet for the first time in recorded history.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
William Herschel, a musician who built his own reflecting telescopes, identifies a new object in 1781 and initially takes it for a comet. It is the first planet discovered rather than known since antiquity, and it doubles the apparent size of the solar system. He and his sister Caroline go on to catalogue thousands of nebulae, and he later discovers infrared radiation by putting a thermometer beyond the red end of a spectrum.