NASA finds new tiny moon around Uranus, raising total to 29
NASA announced the discovery of a new small moon around Uranus on Tuesday, revealing a faint world designated S/2025 U1 that raised the planet’s known satellite family to 29, including 10 irregular moons. The object did not yet have a formal name, which required approval from the International Astronomical Union, the authority that assigns names and official designations to astronomical objects. The finding added to Uranus’s known system of moons and made it the planet with the most moons in the solar system.
The James Webb Space Telescope detected the moon with high-resolution Near-Infrared Camera imaging during observations made in February, according to Space.com. NASA said the data came from ongoing Webb research that had not undergone peer review, according to Libertatea. NASA also released a short video showing the faint speck of the new moon orbiting Uranus.
“This object was observed in a series of 10 long-exposure images of 40 minutes each captured by the Near-Infrared Camera. It’s a small moon, but a significant discovery—something that even NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft did not see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago,” said Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist at SwRI, according to Phys.org. Researchers said Webb’s resolution and infrared sensitivity made it well suited to detect faint, distant objects that earlier instruments missed.
With an estimated diameter of about 10 kilometers, or approximately six miles, S/2025 U1 was a small satellite that likely escaped detection by Voyager 2 and other telescopes. The moon orbited near Uranus’s equatorial plane at about 56,000 kilometers from the planet’s center, moving between the orbits of Ophelia and Bianca. Its nearly circular path suggested it formed near its current location. For scale, Earth’s moon orbits at an average distance of 238,855 miles, or 384,400 kilometers, from Earth.
S/2025 U1 was the 14th member of the tight-knit group of small inner moons orbiting inside the paths of Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. About half of Uranus’s moons were small and orbited at close distances, with some helping to maintain the shape of the rings. Small moons like S/2025 U1 may stabilize Uranus’s rings and influence their structure. Unlike the ring systems of Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus’s rings contained dark material and were more difficult to observe.
Voyager 2 remained the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus, flying past the planet in January 1986 and returning more than 7,000 images. At the time of the flyby, astronomers knew of only five moons. The new finding showed how modern space telescopes continued work begun by earlier missions.
“No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, and their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons,” said Matthew Tiscareno of the SETI Institute, according to Space.com. “Moreover, the new moon is smaller and much fainter than the smallest of the previously known inner moons, making it likely that even more complexity remains to be discovered,” Tiscareno also wrote, according to Phys.org.
Scientists said Webb’s capabilities opened new opportunities to study the outer solar system and suggested that more tiny moons likely awaited discovery around Uranus. All of Uranus’s moons, including S/2025 U1, were named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, and the International Astronomical Union would approve an official name for S/2025 U1 in the future. Astronomers continued to analyze the new moon’s size and orbit using Webb data.
Written with the help of a news-analysis system.
NASA's Webb telescope finds a new tiny moon around Uranus
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