Discovery and Name
Discovered on 24 October 1851 by William Lassell, it is named for a sky spirit in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock and Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Both Ariel and the slightly larger Uranian satellite Umbriel were discovered by William Lassell on 24 October 1851. Although William Herschel, who discovered Uranus's two largest moons Titania and Oberon in 1787, claimed to have observed four additional moons, this was never confirmed and those four objects are now thought to be spurious.
All of Uranus's moons are named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare or Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. The names of all four satellites of Uranus then known were suggested by John Herschel in 1852 at the request of Lassell. Ariel is named after the leading sylph in The Rape of the Lock. It is also the name of the spirit who serves Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The moon is also designated Uranus I.
Read more about this topic: Ariel (moon)
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)