That’s right, Uranus got itself a new moon—well, a new-to-you moon. This new moon, called S/2025 U1, is one of the smallest and closest moons to Uranus.
Even inside our own solar system, astronomers are still discovering new planetary objects, including moons! S/2025 U1 is Uranus’s 29th moon and orbits just 35,000 miles from the gas giant’s surface. Because it’s so small, close, and faint, it was only discovered through the use of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
The team that discovered the new moon was based out of Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute, a giant in space research and observations. The team made 10 separate 40-minute exposures of Uranus using Webb’s near-infrared camera, the telescope’s most powerful and popular instrument.
Historically, Uranus’s moons are named after characters from Shakespeare’s plays. S/2025 U1 will likely be renamed to reflect this theme in the near future by the International Astronomical Union.
Being one of the most distant planets in our solar system, not much exploration has been done of the Uranus system. Voyager 2 has been the only spacecraft to visit the system. During that time, scientists only knew of five moons around Uranus; Voyager 2, a probe still in operation since 1977, discovered 10 more.
With S/2025 U1’s recent discovery, scientists believe that more moons could be found orbiting around Uranus.
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