Scientists spot new moon orbiting Uranus: ‘A significant discovery'
Scientists have spotted a new moon orbiting Uranus that is so tiny it can be circumnavigated in just a few hours.
NASA announced Tuesday that the still unnamed moon was captured by the Webb Telescope in February.
The Uranus system has moons named for characters from British writers Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
University of Idaho
At only six miles wide, the orbiter had eluded observation — even that of the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its flyby in 1977 — due to its miniscule size, according to NASA.
The moon is so small — just over 90 football fields — that the average person could traverse it in just a few hours.
'It's a small moon but a significant discovery,' declared Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, which led the team that made the discovery.
Uranus now has 28 known moons with about half of the rocks smaller and orbiting closer to their home planet than the new discovery.
During a flyby in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft failed to detect the newly announced moon orbiting Uranus.
AP
However, the new moon is inside the orbit of the planet' largest moons — Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon.
Those moons are named after literary characters from great British writers William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, with others including Desdemona, Trinculo, and Puck.
'There's probably a lot more of them and we just need to keep looking,' Matthew Tiscareno, planetary scientist with the SETI Institute told the Associated Press.
The discovery has not yet been peer-reviewed.
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A new moon discovered orbiting Uranus is so small, you could walk it in two hours
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