Researchers have discovered a new moon orbiting the seventh planet from the sun, Uranus.
It was found by using the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope. The camera was developed by University of Arizona researchers.
It is the 29th moon found orbiting the gas giant that is roughly 2 billion miles away from Earth. It lies just at the edge of the planet’s inner rings.
The newly found object is estimated to be only 6 miles wide, less than the walking distance between the city halls of Phoenix and Tempe.
“It is dark. It is faint. It is not very bright, suggesting that it is not only water ice, cause if it's only water ice it will be very bright,” said Maryame El Moutamid, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and study author.
It’s so small, it was not visible to the Voyager 2 spacecraft that flew by Uranus in the mid-'80s.
El Moutamid said they looked at the planet because of the structure of its rings.
“The reason why a ring is very narrow is because you have a moon here and another moon here pulling on both sides by interaction by gravity interaction. That stops the ring from spreading and just losing all the material,” she said.
She said that her proposal of looking at ring structures she studied allowed her team to get access to take images with the JWST. A telescope of its power was needed to accomplish the images.
“JWST is the best. The camera within it, it's the best resolution that we have so far from space," El Moutamid said.
The moon orbits about 35,000 miles from the center of Uranus. For comparison, the average distance of our moon from the Earth’s surface is about 238,855 miles.
El Moutamid said more research needs to be done to really understand the object.
“The observations we get so far are good enough to confirm a real moon, not to give accurate measurements of the astrometry of its orbit,” she said.
The moon is unnamed, but Uranus' other satellites are named from Shakespeare characters like Juliet. El Moutamid says she will also propose a name from the Bard.
“We have to propose a Shakespearean name because all the other moons have Shakespearean names.”
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