Here In The 21st Century, It Is Unusual To Find... We've "Missed" A Moon, Among Our Eight Near Neighbors... But It Has Happened, At Uranus: JWST

As I say, with post-Millennium ultra high pixel Chilean monster optical scopes, and vast dish network arrayed radio telescopes -- and even prior razor sharp space 'scopes. . . it is surprising that even a tiny moon was. . . missed.

But just a few months ago, in data downloaded on February 2, 2025 -- the JWST team saw a tiny little moon -- never noticed before, orbiting one of our most distant gas giant outer planets. That makes. . . 29, out there. Here's the scoop:

. . .Using NASA’s [JWST], a team led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has identified a previously unknown moon orbiting Uranus, expanding the planet’s known satellite family to 29. . . .

“This object was spotted in a series of 10 40-minute long-exposure images captured by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam),” said Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division based in Boulder, Colorado. “It’s a small moon but a significant discovery, which is something that even NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft didn’t see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago. . . .”

I love these sorts of "undiscovered country" space stories. And we will await its more poetic, and formal naming. [Tradition dictates that it be a name from Alexander Pope's writings, or those of Will Shakespeare.] So, we await that, with a grin -- out in Boulder. Woot!

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