Produced by: Tarun Mishra Designed by: Muskan Arora
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center has announced the discovery of three previously unknown moons of Uranus and Neptune.
Scientists have identified the faintest moons ever detected around Uranus and Neptune using ground-based telescopes.
Image : Carnegie Science
It required special image processing techniques to reveal these faint celestial objects.
Image : Carnegie Science
The latest addition brings Uranus's total moon count to 28, with the newly discovered moon measuring about 8 kilometers in diameter. It orbits Uranus every 680 days and has been named S/2023 U1.
Consistent with tradition, this new moon, like all outer satellites of Uranus, will be named after a character from a Shakespeare play.
The moon S/2023 U1 was first spotted by Scott S. Sheppard using the Magellan telescopes at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Follow-up observations were made in December 2023.
Sheppard collaborated with researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Hawaii, Northern Arizona University, and Kindai University to identify the new moons. Older images from 2021 and data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii aided in the discovery process.
Additionally, the team discovered two new moons of Neptune, with one being brighter and the other extremely faint. These moons were located using observations from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and the Magellan Telescope.