The rings of Uranus were the first to be found around a planet other than Saturn. The American astronomer James L. Elliot and colleagues discovered the ring system from Earth in 1977, nine years before the Voyager 2 encounter, during a stellar occultation by Uranus—i.e., when the planet passed between a star and Earth, temporarily blocking the star’s light. Unexpectedly, they observed the star to dim briefly five times at some considerable distance above Uranus’s atmosphere both before and after the planet occulted the star. The dips in brightness indicated that the planet was encircled by five narrow rings. Later Earth-based observations revealed four additional rings. Voyager 2 detected a 10th ring and found indications of others. Outward from Uranus, the 10 are named 6, 5, 4, Alpha, Beta, Eta, Gamma, Delta, Lambda, and Epsilon. The cumbersome nomenclature arose as the new rings were found in places that did not fit the original nomenclature. Characteristics of the rings are given in the table.

The rings are narrow and fairly opaque. Observed widths are simply the radial distances between the beginning and the end of the individual dimming events. Equivalent widths are the product (more precisely, the integral) of the radial distance and the fraction of starlight blocked. The fact that the equivalent widths are generally less than the observed widths indicates that the rings are not completely opaque. Combining the brightness of the rings observed in Voyager images with the equivalent widths from occultations shows that the ring particles reflect less than 5 percent of the incident sunlight. Their nearly flat reflectance spectrum means that the particles are basically gray in colour. Ordinary soot, which is mostly carbon, is the closest terrestrial analogue. It is not known whether the carbon comes from darkening of methane by particle bombardment or is intrinsic to the ring particles.

The scattering effects on Voyager’s radio signal propagated through the rings to Earth revealed that the rings consist of mostly large particles, objects greater than 140 cm (4.6 feet) across. Scattering of sunlight when Voyager was on the far side of the rings and aiming its camera back toward the Sun also revealed small dust particles in the micrometre size range. Only a small amount of dust was found in the main rings. Most of the microscopic particles were instead distributed in the spaces between the main rings, which suggests that the rings are losing mass as a result of collisions. The lifetime of the dust in orbit around Uranus is limited by drag exerted by the planet’s extended atmosphere and by the radiation pressure of sunlight; the dust particles are driven to lower orbits and eventually fall into the Uranian atmosphere. The calculated orbital lifetimes are so short—1,000 years—that the dust must be rapidly and continually created. Uranus’s atmospheric drag appears to be so large that the present rings themselves may be short-lived. If so, the rings did not form with Uranus, and their origin and history are unknown.

Collisions between the tightly packed ring particles would naturally lead to an increase in the radial width of the rings. Moons more massive than the rings can halt this spreading in a process called shepherding. Certain orbits that lie inside or outside the orbit of a given ring are at the proper radius for a moon in such an orbit to establish a stable dynamic resonance with the ring particles. The condition for the resonance is that the orbital periods of the moon and the ring particles are related to each other in the ratio of small whole numbers. In this kind of relationship, as the moon and the particles pass one another periodically, they interact gravitationally in a way that tends to maintain the regularity of the encounters. The moon exerts a net torque on the ring, and, as the moon and ring exchange angular momentum, energy is dissipated by collisions among the ring particles. The outcome is that the moon and ring particles repel each other. Whichever body is in the outer orbit moves outward, while the one in the inner orbit moves inward. Because the moon is much more massive than the ring, it prevents the ring from spreading across the radius at which resonance occurs. A pair of shepherd moons, one on either side of a ring, can maintain its narrow width.

Voyager 2 found that the innermost two moons, Cordelia and Ophelia, orbit on either side of the Epsilon ring at exactly the right radii required for shepherding. Shepherds for the other rings were not observed, perhaps because the moons are too small to be seen in the Voyager images. Small moons may also be reservoirs that supply the dust leaving the ring system.