Uranus, James Webb Space Telescope and Moon
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Researchers discovered a new 'tiny' moon using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the largest, most powerful telescope ever launched into space.
Roll out the cosmic welcome mat for our solar system’s newest resident: a never-before-seen moon orbiting Uranus. The Webb telescope’s observations of Uranus are giving scientists better insight into one of the more mysterious planets in our solar system.
Over millions of years, Uranus’s inner moons may have collided and spread out into rings. As the material in the rings diffused, they moved farther away from the planet. Eventually, that material can start to accumulate, recycling itself back into a moon.
It is the 29th moon found orbiting the seventh planet from the sun, Uranus. It was discovered with the James Webb Space Telescope.
“No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, and their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons,” SETI Institute researcher Matthew Tiscareno said in a statement for NASA.
The outer reaches of our solar system just got a little more crowded, with astronomers spotting a previously unseen moon circling Uranus using the James Webb Space Telescope.
Scientists think the new tiny moon hid for so long -- even eluding the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its flyby about 40 years ago — because of its small size.
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Space.com on MSNDon't miss the moon rendezvous with the Pleiades in the early morning sky Aug. 16–17
The moon will sweep close to the Pleiades open star cluster in the early morning hours of Aug. 16-17, with the ice giant Uranus lurking unseen nearby.