WASHINGTON : Named S/2025 U1, the moon was detected on February 2, 2025, during a targeted observation by a research team from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. NASA confirmed the discovery on its official website and noted that the International Astronomical Union will later assign the moon an official name.
With an estimated diameter of just 10 kilometers, the newly discovered moon is too small to have been detected by earlier missions, including NASA's Voyager 2, which passed by Uranus in 1986.
The discovery underscores the powerful observational capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which continues to deliver unprecedented data from the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond. Scientists believe this finding may offer new clues about the complex formation history and gravitational dynamics of Uranus’s moon system.