San Antonio Research Hub Finds New Moon Orbiting Uranus

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Scientists from a  San Antonio-based research hub have found a new moon orbiting Uranus using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

Southwest Research Institute said it discovered a previously unknown "tiny moon" orbiting the seventh planet from the sun.

Maryame El Moutamid, a lead researcher in SwRI's Boulder, Colo., office, observed the small object in images taken by the $10 billion space telescope in February.

"We found a previously unknown satellite of the ice giant, which has been provisionally designated S/2025 U 1," El Moutamid said  in a statement . "This object, by far the smallest object discovered to date, was detected in a series of 10 long exposures obtained by the Near-Infrared Camera."

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The SwRI team got about 12 hours of time to use the telescope as part of the program's General Observer program, which allows scientists from around the world to access data from the observatory that orbits the Sun about a million miles from Earth. 

The only craft to visit Uranus was  Voyager 2 which flew within 50,000 miles of the planet's cloud tops in January 1986. It discovered Uranus' rings and 10 of the planet's moons, according to SwRI.   

The newly discovered moon "is well below the detection threshold for the Voyager 2 cameras," El Moutamid said.