Surprise! NASA’s Webb Telescope Finds a Tiny New Moon Around Uranus

There’s a new addition to Uranus’ growing family of moons, and it’s one we almost missed.

Using NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have spotted a tiny, faint moon quietly orbiting Uranus. This marks the 29th known moon around the planet, and it’s one of the smallest yet.

“At first I couldn’t believe it,” said Maryame El Moutamid, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. “It’s the first time I ever discovered a moon — I was really excited.”

The discovery happened earlier this year when El Moutamid and her team took a closer look at Uranus using JWST. Over the course of about seven hours, they captured ten long-exposure images of the planet and its surroundings.

In each photo, a faint dot kept showing up, moving slowly but consistently just outside the planet’s thin, inner rings. After checking and rechecking the data, the team realized this wasn’t a background star or a camera error. It was something real.

For now, the moon is called S/2025 U1 (just a temporary scientific name). It orbits Uranus at a distance of about 56,000 kilometers from the planet’s center and is only around 10 kilometers wide. That’s small, roughly the size of a city.

Because it’s so small and faint, it’s no surprise it wasn’t seen before. Older telescopes and even NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew by Uranus in 1986, didn’t have the tools to spot it.

Unlike other planets, Uranus spins on its side, and its rings are unusually narrow. Scientists think that small moons, like this new one, could be helping to keep those rings in place.

El Moutamid is leading a project that studies Uranus’ rings and moons, so finding a new one adds a lot to what scientists know and helps them ask better questions for future missions.

The new moon will eventually get a real name, too. Like all of Uranus’ moons, it will be named after a character from the works of William Shakespeare or Alexander Pope. That tradition means we might one day call it something like Rosalind, Ophelia, or Belinda, names already taken by some of Uranus’s other moons.

The official name will be decided by the International Astronomical Union, the organization responsible for naming things in space.

With the success of this discovery, scientists think there could be even more tiny moons around Uranus that we haven’t spotted yet. And with NASA planning a new Uranus orbiter mission in the 2030s, there’s a good chance we’ll find them.

“Probably, there are a lot of moons out there,” El Moutamid said. “They’re just waiting to be discovered.”

Even in 2025, the solar system still has surprises up its sleeve. And with better tools like the Webb Telescope, we’re getting better at finding them.