![\"Uranus](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/2025-u1-well-13-28-109816106.jpg\")
The Uranus system has moons named for characters from British writers Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. University of Idaho<\/p>\nA cheeky discovery.<\/p>\n
Scientists have spotted a new moon orbiting Uranus that is so tiny it can be circumnavigated in just a few hours.<\/p>\n
NASA announced Tuesday that the still unnamed moon was captured by the Webb Telescope in February.<\/p>\n
The Uranus system has moons named for characters from British writers Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. University of Idaho<\/p>\n
At only six miles wide, the orbiter had eluded observation \u2014 even that of the Voyager 2 spacecraft during its flyby in 1977 \u2014 due to its miniscule size, according to NASA.<\/p>\n
The moon is so small \u2014 just over 90 football fields \u2014 that the average person could traverse it in just a few hours.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a small moon but a significant discovery,\u201d declared Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, which led the team that made the discovery.<\/p>\n
Uranus now has 28 known moons with about half of the rocks smaller and orbiting closer to their home planet than the new discovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Hubble](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/image-provided-esa-hubble-shows-108207606.jpg\")
During a flyby in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft failed to detect the newly announced moon orbiting Uranus. AP<\/p>\n
However, the new moon is inside the orbit of the planet\u2019 largest moons \u2014 Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon.<\/p>\n
Those moons are named after literary characters from great British writers William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, with others including Desdemona, Trinculo, and Puck.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s probably a lot more of them and we just need to keep looking,\u201d Matthew Tiscareno, planetary scientist with the SETI Institute told the Associated Press.<\/p>\n
The discovery has not yet been peer-reviewed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cheeky discovery. Scientists have spotted a new moon orbiting Uranus that is so tiny it can be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[7042,718,6625,79,780,193],"class_list":["post-96519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-moon","tag-nasa","tag-planets","tag-science","tag-solar-system","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}