Our Solar System Is Still Hiding Moons, and We’re Getting Better at Finding Them

By Dave Levitan | August 21, 2025 | 12:15pm

Image via NASA

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Our Solar System Is Still Hiding Moons, and We’re Getting Better at Finding Them

There is something comforting to the idea that even within our own little solar system, through which we have sent probes and rovers and other astonishing bits of space tech, there remains a hefty degree of mystery. It is also comforting, though, that our collective ability to penetrate more of those mysteries continues to improve.

NASA announced this week that using observations from the James Webb Telescope scientists have discovered a previously unknown moon orbiting Uranus — the planet’s 29th satellite, so far at least. This is extremely cool.

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“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,” said Maryame El Moutamid, of the Southwest Research Institute, who led the team that found the little fella. It is only about six miles in diameter, or, say, the distance from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan to the Great Lawn in the middle of Central Park.

Even cooler, the scientists believe that the small moon, like others of the Uranus’s collection of satellites, may have actually been formed from material that used to be in the planet’s rings. And those rings probably used to be moons — over millions of years they may have collided, with the debris creating what are now 13 narrow rings. But as the material in the rings moved slowly away from Uranus, they may have coalesced back into solid, moon-like bodies. According to the New York Times, El Moutamid said that this is “the most likely scenario” with the newly discovered satellite.

Moon to ring and back to moon — again, comforting. And this type of discovery keeps happening: in 2019, Neptune’s 13 moons gained a new sibling, thanks to observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Earlier this year, scientists confirmed that Saturn, already home to around 150 known satellites, actually had 128 more than we thought. They speculate that there could be thousands more.