New Moon Discovered Orbiting Uranus Using NASA’s Webb Telescope
August 19, 2025

Editor’s Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.
Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has identified a previously unknown moon orbiting Uranus, expanding the planet’s known satellite family to 29.
The detection was made during a Webb observation Feb. 2, 2025.

“This object was spotted in a series of 10 40-minute long-exposure images captured by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam),” said Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division based in Boulder, Colorado.
“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.”

The newly discovered moon is estimated to be just six miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, assuming it has a similar reflectivity (albedo) to Uranus’ other small satellites.
That tiny size likely rendered it invisible to Voyager 2 and other telescopes.

“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,” said Matthew Tiscareno of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, a member of the research team.
“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 new moon is the 14th member of the intricate system of small moons orbiting inward of the largest moons Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon.