Another moon has been found orbiting Uranus, making it the 29th discovered around one of the largest planets in the Solar System.
University of Idaho physics professor Matthew Hedman was part of the team, led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), that made the discovery.
The thirteen rings encircling Uranus are exceptionally narrow, said Hedman, and the icy giant’s moons are orbiting so closely that their gravitational pulls can tug on each other, which can lead to collisions.
“It indicates we don’t really understand what’s going on in this system, and that tells us there’s still a lot about how things are going on in space that we still need to learn,” he said.
The giant planets in the outer solar system have huge families of moons that are smaller in comparison to their bigger planets, Hedman said.
If Earth were the size of a nickel, Uranus would be the size of a softball, according to NASA. The atmosphere of the gigantic planet is made mostly of hydrogen and helium with traces of water and ammonia.
Understanding more about how Uranus’s moons interact could help scientists learn more about the physics of asteroid belts, Hedman said.
“The same basic physics that can drive asteroids in the asteroid belt into trajectories that could get closer to us,” he said.
The moon was found using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Hedman said.
“It’s a small moon but a significant discovery, which is something that even NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft didn’t see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago,” said Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division based in Boulder, Colorado, according to a press release from NASA.
Of Uranus’s 29 moons, five are major moons. Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel and Miranda —discovered between 1787 and 1948 — are all named from characters in works by Shakespeare or English poet Alexander Pope, according to a press release from the Southwest Research Institute.
While the latest addition doesn’t yet have an official name, “Our team is getting a lot of culture trying to figure out what to name our new discovery,” said El Moutamid.
At just six miles in diameter, the newest moon found orbiting Uranus is also the smallest.
