"It's like staring into the headlight of a car and trying to look at a fly."
"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,"
"No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, and their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons,"
"Moreover, 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."
The James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) detected an unnamed moon orbiting Uranus at about 35,000 miles in early February. The object measures an estimated six miles across, likely explaining why previous missions missed it. The moon's nearly perfectly circular orbit suggests formation near its current location. The discovery raises Uranus's known satellite count to 29 and highlights the abundance of small inner moons whose interactions with the rings imply a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between rings and moons. Formation hypotheses include gradual accretion in a circumplanetary disk or a large impact that released material.
Read at Futurism
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