The new moon of Uranus S/2025 U1 was discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope.
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/M. El Mutamid (SwRI)/M. Hedman (University of Idaho)
This year, astronomers have discovered more than 100 previously unknown satellites in our solar system. They may have yet to be discovered, and cataloging them could help us better understand how planets form.
In March Edward Ashton at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and his colleagues discovered 128 moons around Saturn, bringing the total number of planets to 274. The team collected hours of images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and stacked them on top of each other to reveal objects that would otherwise be too faint to see.
Ashton's team now has the authority to name new moons, although there are so many Saturn moons that many of them are no longer given informal names.
In August small and dim new moon was discovered orbiting Uranus, bringing the total number of planets to 29. Mariam El Mutamid from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and her colleagues made the discovery using 10 long-exposure infrared images taken by NASA. James Webb Space Telescope.
The team is still staying tight-lipped about potential names for the moon, so it still has the tentative name S/2025 U1. Eventually it will likely be named after the 27 moons of Uranus, which take the name of a character from one of Shakespeare's plays. This convention dates back to the discovery of the planet's first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787.
Nigel Mason from the University of Kent in the UK say many more moons are likely to be discovered in our solar system, especially around Neptune and Uranus, although the largest ones have probably already been mapped.
“Everyone always likes to find new moons, and everyone always likes to think about what to name 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 this information to update our models of planet formation,” says Mason.
“Why are there so many of them? What provoked [planets] make 40, 50, 60 of these different shapes and sizes? That's why they're so interesting,” he says. “It's not just stamp collecting. It's truly “wow”. Surprisingly, the entire process of planet formation is not as well understood as we think.”
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