Astronomers spotted a never-before-seen, bite-sized moon orbiting Uranus, bringing the ice giant’s follower count to 29. The moon is so small and faint—well below the detection threshold of NASA’s Voyager 2 probe—that scientists believe Uranus may host many more undiscovered, tiny moons.
The moon, provisionally named S/2025 U1, first entered the view of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on February 2, 2025. Further imaging led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) shows that it sits at the edge of Uranus’s inner rings, about 35,000 miles (56,000 kilometers) from its center in the planet’s equatorial plane.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of S/2025 U1 is its tiny size. Assuming it has a similar reflectivity to Uranus’s other moons, the object measures only about 6 miles (10 kilo