New Satellites Orbiting Uranus and Neptune Discovered by Astronomers in Groundbreaking Observations

KOMPAS.com – Astronomers managed to find interesting things in their observations.

They managed to discover a new satellite orbiting Uranus and two new satellites around Neptune.

Also read: How Many Satellites Does Saturn Have?

The satellite was successfully revealed after astronomers made observations using observatories in Chile and Hawaii.

The small satellite appeared as a faint dot in the outer reaches of the Solar System after hours of ground-based observations.

Quoting Gizmodo, Monday (26/2/2024) Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science who carried out the identification, first saw the Uranus satellite on November 4, 2023.

Meanwhile two previously unknown moons of Neptune were visible in September 2021.

“These three newly discovered satellites are the faintest satellites ever and were discovered around two ice giant planets using ground-based telescopes,” Sheppard said in a statement.

“Special image processing is needed to reveal these faint objects,” he said again.

New satellite

The new satellite of Uranus is the first satellite discovered around the ice giant in more than 20 years.

This new satellite of Uranus is also likely to be the smallest of the 28 other satellites orbiting Uranus.

Also read: What does Earth’s satellite moon core look like?

This satellite is only 8 kilometers wide and takes 680 days to complete one orbit around Uranus.

Most of Uranus’ satellites are named after characters from Shakespearea (e.g., Ophelia, Sycorax, Juliet, Desdemona, etc.).

Although currently named S/2023 U1, the satellite will eventually be renamed to follow this tradition.

So what about Neptune’s new satellite?

Neptune’s brightest new satellite, S/2002 N5, is 23 km wide and took almost nine years to orbit Neptune.

Sheppard used the Magellan telescope in Chilli to confirm S/2002 N5’s orbit in October 2021 and again in 2022 and November 2023.

Meanwhile, Neptune’s new, fainter satellite S/2021 N1 is 14 km wide and takes 27 years to complete one orbit.

As the faintest satellite ever discovered using ground-based observations, S/2021 N1 required help from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and Gemini Observatory’s 8-meter telescope to confirm the discovery.

Sheppard, with the help of several scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Hawaii, Northern Arizona University, and Kindai University, had to capture five-minute exposures over three or four hours over several nights to confirm it.

Also read: What does Mars’ smallest satellite look like?

“Satellites move for only a few minutes relative to the background of stars and galaxies; a single long exposure is not ideal for capturing depth images of moving objects,” explained Sheppard.

“By combining multiple exposures, stars and galaxies will appear with trails behind them and objects moving similar to the parent planet will be seen as point sources, bringing out satellites from behind the background in the image,” he explained again.

The three new satellites have unique, distant and tilted orbits, suggesting they were captured by the gravitational pull of Uranus and Neptune after the ice giants formed.

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2024-02-27 02:49:00
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