New moon discovered orbiting Uranus is its smallest one

A small and dark moon has been discovered in orbit around Uranus, bringing the total of the planet to 29. Many other moons of the ice giant are named after characters from William Shakespeare’s works, and scientists now debate from which of his characters can lend his name.

The new moon was discovered by a team led by Maryame El Moutamid at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, using 10 long -exposure infrared images taken by the James Webb space telescope of NASA (JWST) on February 2 of this year.

The moon currently has the provisional name S / 2025 U 1. But over time, it will probably be named in the same direction as 27 of the moons of Uranus: to take the name of a character from one of the pieces of Shakespeare. This convention dates back to the discovery of the first two moons on the planet, Titania and Oberon, in 1787.

The name chosen for the newly found moon must be approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the main authority in the allocation of official names and designations to astronomical objects. Mark Showalter at the SETI Institute, who was part of the research team and is a avowed theater fan, says there have been discussions but not yet a selection.

Showalter says that spotting such a small and dark moon was a difficult task. “It is a small object right next to a very, very brilliant object. It’s like looking in the lighthouse of a car and trying to look at a fly, ”he says. “The James Webb telescope is an extraordinary instrument which is much more sensitive than any other telescope that has ever existed, frankly.”

There is hope that more moons are around Uranus, explains Showalter. “We have certainly not finished the work,” he says. “I think it is reasonable to assume that there are more satellites. We always suspect that there could be satellites in the ring system which are in a way what we call the launes of shepherd, which push the material of the ring. We have not yet found it, but this is a major objective for our current work. ”

El Moutamid says that the sharpness of Uranus’s rings indicates that there are probably more moons, but not discovered, which have helped the formation of the rings. “There are probably much more that wait for us to detect them,” she says. Some of them can be found by JWST, but there could be a rash discovered by the Orbiter of Uranus and the probe mission proposed in 2044 if it goes forward as expected. “There are probably a lot of moons that are very tiny, and we simply cannot detect them because of the resolution we have so far,” she said.

S / 2025 U 1 is estimated about 10 kilometers in diameter, which means that it is too small to have been seen by cameras aboard the Voyager 2 probe. Traveling 2 was launched in 1977 and went through Uranus in 1986, approaching 81,500 kilometers. There remains the closest pass of Uranus by a spaceship of the earth.

The new moon is on the edge of the interior rings of Uranus, located approximately 56,250 kilometers from its center in the equatorial plane of the planet. This places it between the orbits of the Ophelia and Bianca moons.

NASA operates an “observing general” program for JWST, which allows any scientist around the world to offer targets that require one of the advanced sensors of the telescope. El Moutamid asked time on the JWST Nircam instrument – a high resolution infrared sensor – to study the rings of Uranus. This application led to the discovery of this new little moon.