Uranus (mythology) three one-hundred-handed giants the Hekatonkheires, and the one-eyed giants the Cyclopes. Uranus imprisoned Gaia's youngest children in Tartarus, deep within Earth, where they caused pain to Gaia. She shaped a great flint-bladed sickle and asked her sons to castrate Uranus. Only Cronus, youngest and most ambitious of the Titans, was willing: he ambushed his father and castrated him, casting the severed testicles into the sea. For this fearful deed, Uranus called his sons Titanes Theoi, or "Straining Gods." From the blood that spilled from Uranus onto the Earth came forth the Giants, the Erinyes (the avenging Furies), the Meliae (the
Atmosphere of Uranus fact later interpreted by Norman Lockyer as indicating that Uranus emitted its own light as opposed to reflecting light from the Sun. In 1889 however, astronomers observed solar Fraunhofer lines in photographic ultraviolet spectra of the planet, proving once and for all that Uranus was shining by reflected light. The nature of the broad dark bands in its visible spectrum remained unknown until the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Although Uranus is presently largely blank in appearance, it has been historically shown to have occasional features, such as in March and April 1884, when astronomers Henri Joseph Perrotin, Norman