EXPLAINER: What connects Inverness to William Shakespeare AND the outer solar system?
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
The Highland capital has a surprising connection to the far flung reaches of our solar system... and it's all thanks to William Shakespeare.
Yes, you read that right, Inverness has a tangible connection to the outer solar system, and it's the direct result of the works of Shakespeare – even though he died centuries before the space age began.
For there's a spectacular oddball of a moon sitting in one of the coldest parts of the solar system that boasts an Inverness of its very own, and it's unlike anything you can imagine.
But first, before we get to that, we must briefly delve into the discovery of one of the solar system's biggest objects – the ice giant Uranus – and the quirky naming tradition that ultimately gave us an Inverness in outer space.
Inverness... twinned with Uranus?
Not quite, but close.
When Uranus was discovered by William Herschel in 1781, no-one was quite sure what to call it.
All the other known planets had been familiar to ancient peoples the world over, and so their names had gradually evolved into titles associated with the gods of ancient Greece or Rome.
Herschel at first dubbed his new discovery Georgium Sidus – or George's Star – in honour of the then British monarch George III.
But when it was realised that this was no star, but a newly-found planet, this break with the tradition of naming them after Roman or Greek gods didn't sit well with the scientific community and, needless to say, it didn't stick.
Fellow astronomer Johann Elert Bode soon suggested the name Uranus – the Greek god of the sky – and the rest is history.
However when the first of Uranus's 27 known moons began to be discovered, the names chosen for them DID mark a departure from the influences of ancient Rome and Greece.
For in a break with tradition – and in contrast to every other planet's moons – it swiftly became accepted to name its natural satellites after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
Titania and Oberon were the first to be discovered – named after fairies from A Midsummer Night's Dream in something of a nod to Uranus and the fairies' shared links to the 'sky'.
These were followed by the discovery of the moons Ariel and Umbriel,
Then, in 1948, came the discovery of a fifth moon of Uranus – Miranda.
And Miranda is where Inverness's cosmic twin comes into the story.
Miranda
At 470 km in diameter, this truly bizarre looking moon is one of the smallest known natural satellites to have sufficient gravity to be spherical in shape.
But while it may be small in size it boasts some truly colossal features on its twisted and heavily contorted surface – all of which only came to light when the space probe Voyager II flew past in 1986.
And when I say colossal, I mean it. Despite its diminutive size, this moon is home to the highest cliff in the entire solar system – the 20km tall Verona Rupes – a feature so tall you'd need two-and-a-quarter Mount Everests stood atop each other to equal its scale.
More Explainers: EXPLAINED: The mysterious three trees artwork in Inverness city centre
But this whopping edifice is not the only giant feature discovered on the moon by Voyager's cameras.
The other features that leapt out to the scientists studying the images were huge chevron-shaped twists on the surface – the still mysterious and not fully understood features called coronae.
And it is one of these mysterious features that bears the name of Inverness.
But why?
In keeping with the Shakespeare naming convention of the moons, many of the features on them also bear titles based upon the Bard's work.
Verona Rupes, for instance, gets its name from the city of Verona, which so famously played the setting to Romeo & Juliet.
And the Inverness Corona was given its Highland moniker due to the city's proximity to Cawdor Castle, of Macbeth fame.
One of the two other coronae named on Miranda's surface has links to Hamlet – Elsinore – while the other bears the name Arden, after the forest in As You Like It.
So, just what is Inverness Corona?
While it's not entirely sure how it formed, one thing we know for sure is it's BIG. Its diameter comes in at 234 km (or 145 miles) – which bearing in mind that Miranda's diameter is only 470 km, gives you some sense of just how massive these features are.
It certainly dwarfs the area covered by the city with which it shares its name.
As for how it formed, while scientists are not entirely sure, there are several theories.
Chief amongst these is that the coronae were formed by rising warmer material from inside the moon's core.
Miranda is mostly composed of water ice and its surface is very old, but it is thought that it once possessed an interior heat source kept warm by gravitational heating. This is a process where the moon's orbit caused its crust to flex, and the friction this repeated flexing caused helped to keep the core warm.
That process is long since thought to have shut down, as the moon's current orbit no longer causes enough gravitational heating.
But when it did still possess internal heat, it is thought that warmer, softer, more malleable ice rose to the surface, pushing the brittle crust up into a dome shape before collapsing in the middle. The material within it then cooled and leaked out of the dome's sides creating a crown-like formation – from which the term corona is derived.
And they are not common features. Only one other planetary body besides Miranda has so far been observed to have them – in this case Venus, although the molten material which causes its 2000km-wide coronae is lava rather than a molten mix of icy slushes.
Miranda's coronae are not quite the scale of Venus's, but they are still nevertheless huge features in their own right –as well as covering large areas of Miranda's surface they are up to 20 km (12 miles) deep in places.
But the idea that Miranda's coronae may have been formed by tectonic forces is not the only theory out there – and for years an altogether more world-shattering theory was particularly popular.
Was Miranda blown apart and stuck back together?
Miranda's striking appearance – full of jagged edges, colossal cliffs and unusual angles – absolutely stunned astronomers when Voyager's images first came back.
And the weird jigsaw-like appearance – something the likes of Inverness Corona and its fellow coronae certainly add to – led to the theory that Miranda had only just survived being torn apart before all the irregular blocks were pulled back together through the moon's gravity.
It may sound extreme, but such moon-shattering forces are known to have played a role in the outer solar system in the past.
Saturn's beautiful ring system, for instance, is now believed to have been formed sometime in the last 100 million years when a former moon's orbit strayed too close and the planet's immense gravitational forces ripped it to shreds before smearing the remains out into a ring disk.
Uranus too show signs of monumental forces at work. The planet spins round the sun on its back – forever orbiting with its poles facing the Sun rather than its equator – and the most widely accepted theory for this is that it was slammed into by a planet-sized object in the very early days of the solar system, tilting it permanently on its axis.
Miranda, as the closest of the 'large' moons of Uranus to its parent planet, could easily have wound up in the firing line of such cosmic fireworks.
But it's still just one theory – one among others which scientists have floated to try to explain these still mysterious features.
Who'd have guessed it – Inverness's cosmic namesake is home to a mystery of its very own as well. Nessie would no doubt be proud.
More Explainers: EXPLAINED: Who has received the Freedom of Inverness?
More Explainers: EXPLAINED: The story behind Inverness's 'stairway to nowhere'
