Today's featured article
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![The high-resolution Voyager 2 image of Titania taken on January 24, 1986](https://web.archive.org/web/20120205164233im_/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/Titania_%28moon%29_color_cropped.jpg/100px-Titania_%28moon%29_color_cropped.jpg)
Titania is the largest of the moons of Uranus and the eighth largest moon in the Solar System. Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, Titania is named after the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Its orbit lies inside Uranus' magnetosphere. Titania consists of approximately equal amounts of ice and rock, and is likely differentiated into a rocky core and an icy mantle. A layer of liquid water may be present at the core–mantle boundary. The surface of Titania, which is relatively dark and slightly red in color, appears to have been shaped by both impacts and endogenic processes. It is covered by numerous impact craters reaching 326 km in diameter, but is less heavily cratered than the surface of Uranus' outermost moon, Oberon. Titania probably underwent an early endogenic resurfacing event that obliterated its older, heavily cratered surface. Like all major moons of Uranus, Titania probably formed from an accretion disk that surrounded the planet just after its formation. As of 2011, the Uranian system has been studied up close only once: by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in January 1986. It took several images of Titania, which allowed mapping of about 40% of the moon’s surface. (more...)
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February 5: Constitution Day in Mexico (1917)
- 1783 – The first of five strong earthquakes hit the region of Calabria in present-day southern Italy, killing more than 32,000 people over a period of nearly two months.
- 1869 – Prospectors in Moliagul, Victoria, Australia, discovered the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found, known as the "Welcome Stranger".
- 1917 – The current constitution of Mexico was adopted, establishing a federal republic with powers separated into independent executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
- 1941 – Second World War: British and Free French forces began the Battle of Keren to capture the strategic town of Keren in Italian Eritrea.
- 2000 – Second Chechen War: As the Battle of Grozny came to a close, Russian forces summarily executed at least 60 civilians in the city's Novye Aldi suburb.
- 2009 – The United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Port Royal ran aground (pictured) on a coral reef off the island of Oahu.
More anniversaries: February 4 – February 5 – February 6
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