Roll out the cosmic welcome mat for our solar system\u2019s newest resident: a never-before-seen moon orbiting Uranus.<\/p>\n
A team of astronomers announced Tuesday that a new satellite measuring roughly 90 football fields across was discovered around the seventh planet from the sun. The moon, which was first seen by NASA\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> on Feb. 2, joins a busy neighborhood of 28 other known moons around Uranus<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Webb telescope\u2019s observations of Uranus<\/a> are giving scientists better insight into one of the more mysterious planets in our solar system.<\/p>\n \u201cNo other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus,\u201d Matthew Tiscareno, a member of the research team and a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in California, said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tiscareno said the \u201ccomplex inter-relationships\u201d between Uranus\u2019 moons and its faint rings suggest the planet\u2019s evolutionary history may have been a chaotic one.<\/p>\n \u201cMoreover, the new moon is smaller and much fainter than the smallest of the previously known inner moons, making it likely that even more complexity remains to be discovered,\u201d he said in the statement.<\/p>\n The newfound satellite is about 35,000 miles from the center of the planet, with a near circular orbit, according to the researchers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s only about 6 miles across \u2014 a distance that can be walked in about two hours at a brisk pace \u2014 but follow-up observations are needed to confirm the moon\u2019s size and other characteristics. <\/p>\n The discovery has also not yet been peer-reviewed.<\/p>\n Uranus has five large, outer moons named Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. The newly discovered moon is inside the orbits of the five larger moons, the researchers said. <\/p>\n All of Uranus\u2019 moons are named after characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, according to NASA. The new moon does not yet have a name, though any designation will eventually need to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, which oversees the official naming process for astronomical objects.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a small moon but a significant discovery, which is something that even NASA\u2019s Voyager 2 spacecraft didn\u2019t see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago,\u201d Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist in the Southwest Research Institute\u2019s Solar System Science and Exploration Division, said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n