Uranus has a new moon (Picture: Getty/Science Photo Libra)
Uranus is mooning again.
Yes, an exciting new object has been found circling Uranus, and we didn’t even need a probe to find it.
Instead, two massive telescopes on Earth zoomed in for a close-up and found the mini moon emerging from behind.
And Uranus isn’t the only one hiding a surprise.
Neptune has not one, but two new moons.
That brings the number of natural satellites in our space patch up to a whopping 294.
Uranus’s new moon is tiny, at just five miles wide, but takes 680 days to complete one orbit around its planet – our own moon takes just 27 days.
At the moment the it is rather named S/2023 U1 (catchy), but it will soon be named after a Shakespearean character, in line with the rest of the 27 moons circling Uranus.
The brighter of the two new moons of Neptune is around 14 miles wide, and is thought to take around nine years to orbit around its host. The fainter moon is eight miles wide and circles Neptune every 27 years.
The discovery image of the new Uranian moon S/2023 U1 using the Magellan telescope (Picture: Dr Scott Sheppard)
Currently known as S/2002 N5 and S/2021 N1 respectively, they will also be given permanent names based on sea gods and nymphs in Greek mythology, and now brings up the number of known moons around the planet to 16.
Scott Sheppard, a staff scientist at Carnegie Science, made the rare find in collaboration with Marina Brozovic and Bob Jacobson of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and astronomers across the globe.
Neptune is big and blue and now with 16 moons (Picture: AP)
Discovering the new moons required taking dozens of five-minute exposures over three- or four-hour periods across a series of nights, which were later layered on top of each other to create one deep image.
‘Because the moons move in just a few minutes relative to the background stars and galaxies, single long exposures are not ideal for capturing deep images of moving objects,’ said Dr Sheppard.
‘By layering these multiple exposures together, stars and galaxies appear with trails behind them, and objects in a motion similar to the host planet will be seen as point sources, bringing the moons out from behind the background noise in the images.’
All three moons have egg-shaped orbits matching the plane of their ice giants, suggesting they were sucked into circling the planets by gravity.