Cleveland, Ohio Astronomers have discovered a previously undiscovered moon orbiting Uranus, adding a little extra crowdedness to the farthest regions of our solar system.
A team from the Southwest Research Institute has discovered a new moon orbiting the Ice Giant using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, bringing the total number of known satellites in the planet’s orbit to 29.
During observations in February, the telescope’s near-infrared sensor detected the moon, which seems to be only six miles across. The discovery was made public by NASA on Tuesday.
Maryame El Moutamid, a principal scientist in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division based in Boulder, Colorado, declared in a blog post that although it is a small moon, it is a major discovery—something that even NASA’s Voyager 2 probe missed during its pass almost 40 years ago.
As part of the Voyager program, which aims to explore the outer solar system, NASA launched Voyager 2 in 1977.
Because of its small size and faintness, scientists believe the recently discovered moon remained hidden from Voyager 2 and other telescopes for a long time.
According to Matthew Tiscareno of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who participated in the discovery, Uranus has more small inner moons than any other planet, and their intricate relationships with the rings suggest a chaotic past that makes it difficult to distinguish between a ring system and a system of moons.
The 28 known moons of Uranus are named after Alexander Pope and Shakespearean figures. The International celestial Union, which is in charge of giving celestial objects formal names and designations, must accept a name for the recently discovered moon.
Roughly half of Uranus’ moons are smaller and move closer to the planet. According to Tiscareno, the new addition might portend more bite-sized moons that are just waiting to be discovered near Uranus.
He remarked, “We just need to keep looking because there’s probably a lot more of them.”
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