Discover the cosmic welcome carpet for the new resident of our solar system: a moon without sight in Uranus orbit.
A team of astronomers announced Tuesday that a new satellite measuring around 90 football fields through was discovered around the seventh planet of the sun. The moon, which was seen for the first time by the James Webb space telescope of NASA on February 2, joined a district animated by 28 other moons known around Uranus.
The observations of the webb telescope on Uranus give scientists a better overview of one of the most mysterious planets of our solar system.
“No other planet has as many small interior moons as Uranus,” Matthew Tiscareno, a member of the research team and the main scientist in the SETI Institute in California, in a statement.
Tiscareno said that “complex interrelations” between the moons of Uranus and its weak rings suggest that the evolutionary history of the planet could have been chaotic.
“In addition, the new moon is smaller and much lower than the smallest of the interior moons previously known, which makes it likely that more complexity remains to be discovered,” he said in the press release.
The new satellite is around 35,000 miles from the center of the planet, with an almost circular orbit, according to the researchers.
It is only 6 miles in diameter – a distance that can be traveled about two hours at a quick rate – but follow -up observations are necessary to confirm the size of the moon and other characteristics.
The discovery has not yet been evaluated by peers.
Uranus has five large external moons named Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. The newly discovered moon is inside the orbits of the five largest moons, the researchers said.
All the moons of Uranus are named after the characters of the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, according to NASA. The new moon has no name yet, although any designation must possibly be approved by the international astronomical union, which oversees the official name process of astronomical objects.
“It is a small moon but an important discovery, something that even the spacecraft travel 2 of NASA did not see during its overflight almost 40 years ago,” said Maryame El Moutamid, a main scientist of the division of sciences and exploration of the solar system of the Southwest Research Institute.
In 1986, the Voyager 2 probe became the first object of human manufacture to pass in front of Uranus, giving humanity its first close views on the distant planet. The historical meeting gave more than 7,000 photographs of Uranus and helped scientists discover two new rings and 11 new moons on the planet.
The very small size of the moon has probably made too small for the cameras to travel 2 to see, but the high resolution instruments of the webb telescope can light up more on the planet and its system.
“In the meantime, the discovery of this moon underlines how modern astronomy continues to rely on the legacy of missions like traveling 2,” said El Moutamid in the press release. “Now, almost four decades later, the James Webb space telescope pushes this border even further.”
