The Solar System - Word Search - PUZZLE #22 TITANIA - August 2025

PUZZLE #22 - TITANIA 

IN-CONTEXT WORD DEFINITIONS

Titania: Titania is Uranus’s largest moon and one of its five major satellites. It has a mix of craters, valleys, and fault lines, indicating past geological activity. It’s named after a character from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, following the naming convention for Uranian moons.

Rupes: Rupes are long, cliff-like scarps or ridges on planetary bodies. On Titania, they are evidence of past tectonic activity, where the surface cracked and shifted. These icy cliffs are created by crustal movement and can stretch for hundreds of kilometers.

Gertrude: Gertrude is Titania’s largest known impact crater, about 326 kilometers wide. Despite its size, the crater is not very deep, suggesting it has partially relaxed over time—possibly due to heat or subsurface activity. It is named after Queen Gertrude from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Opposition Surge: An opposition surge is a sudden increase in brightness of a surface when the Sun is directly behind the observer (e.g., Earth), illuminating the object fully and head-on. Titania exhibits this phenomenon due to its icy, porous surface, which reflects sunlight strongly when viewed from this angle.

Faults: Faults are fractures in the moon's crust where sections of the surface have moved relative to each other. On Titania, faults form part of its tectonic features, such as scarps and valleys, indicating that the moon expanded and cracked as its interior cooled.

Chasma: A chasma (plural

Messina: Messina Chasma is one of the largest known canyons (chasmata) on Titania. It likely formed due to tectonic forces as Titania’s interior expanded and cracked the surface. It runs for hundreds of kilometers and is a key piece of evidence for past geologic activity.

Herschel: William Herschel was the discoverer of Titania in 1787. He also discovered Oberon (another Uranian moon) and the planet Uranus itself. The name Herschel is often referenced when discussing Titania's discovery or early astronomical studies of Uranus's moons.

Geologic Activity: Geologic activity on Titania refers to past tectonic and impact-related processes. Features like faults, grabens, rupes, and chasmata suggest that Titania was once geologically active, likely due to internal heating and freezing, although it is inactive today.

Secret Word: Titania is named after the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in that mythological and literary tradition, she can be considered a daughter figure of the sky (Ouranos/Uranus). The term also reflects the naming convention of Uranian moons, which often come from characters in Shakespearean works involving family relationships.