More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025
Uranus’ new moon, S/2025 U1, was spotted using the James Webb Space Telescope
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/M. El Moutamid (SwRI)/Mr. Hedman (University of Idaho)
This year, astronomers have discovered more than 100 previously unknown moons in our own solar system. There may be many more yet to be discovered, and cataloging them could help us better understand how planets form.
In March, Edward Ashton of Academia Sinica in Taiwan and his colleagues discovered 128 moons around Saturn, bringing the planet’s total to 274. The team gathered hours of images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and stacked them on top of each other to spot objects that would otherwise be too dark to see.
Ashton’s team now has the right to name new moons, although Saturn’s moons are so numerous that many no longer receive informal names.
In August, a small and dim new moon was found orbiting Uranus, bringing the planet’s total to 29. Maryame El Moutamid of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and her colleagues made the discovery using 10 long-exposure infrared images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
The team remains tight-lipped about potential names for the Moon, so it still has the provisional name S/2025 U1. In time, it will likely have the same name as 27 of Uranus’ moons, which are named after a character in a Shakespeare play. This convention dates back to the discovery of the planet’s first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787.
Nigel Mason of the University of Kent, UK, says there are likely to be many more moons to discover in our solar system, particularly around Neptune and Uranus, although the largest of them have probably already been mapped.
“Everyone always likes to find new moons and everyone always likes to think about what they’re going to call them,” he says. “It’s an exciting moment. It’s a bit of a legacy.”
The more we catalog and measure our local moons, the more we can learn about how they are created and use that information to update our models of planet formation, Mason says.
“Why are there so many? What started [planets] make 40, 50, 60 of such varied shapes and sizes? That’s why they’re exciting,” he says. “It’s not just about collecting stamps. It’s really “wow”. It’s really surprising that the whole process of planet formation is not as well understood as we think. »
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