Astronomers just spotted a tiny new moon lurking in Uranus’s orbit. The James Webb Space Telescope clocked this barely visible satellite, named S/2025 U1, during a scan on February 2.
At just 6 miles across, it would only take you a couple of hours to walk across it. This faint little rock was so dim and distant that even Voyager 2, the legendary spacecraft that first flew past Uranus in 1986, didn’t catch it.
S/2025 U1 brings Uranus’s known moon count to 29, and scientists suspect there are many more microscopic satellites still waiting to be found. The moon’s orbit, about 35,000 miles from the planet’s center, places it right on the edge of Uranus’s inner rings, a chaotic cosmic wasteland where moons and ring debris intermingle.
Scientists Just Found a New Moon Orbiting Uranus
“It’s a small moon but a significant discovery,” said Maryame El Moutamid of the Southwest Research Institute in a press release. He’s not getting: this discovery of a new moon is even more evidence that Uranus’s ring-moon system is way more complex than once thought. It all suggests that the many moons of Uranus may be locked in a perpetual cycle of colliding, breaking apart, and reforming.
The James Webb Space Telescope is picking up where Voyager 2 left off, nearly 40 years later, showing us that our understanding of the solar system’s weirder outskirts is still evolving. Uranus continues to surprise, and not just because its name is great for a good laugh.
All but three of Uranus’ moons are named after characters that have appeared in the plays of William Shakespeare, so it’s expected to get a Shakespearean name one of these days.
I propose that for just one moon, they lean into the immature, scatological nature of the planet’s name, pair it with the new moon’s small stature and penchant for hiding in darkness, and call it Dingleberry.
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