Three mysterious objects discovered orbiting Neptune and Uranus in ‘strange loop’
SCIENTISTS have discovered three never-before-seen celestial bodies orbiting Neptune and Uranus.
The objects are all moons and were found using a special imaging technique.
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One of the new moons was found orbiting Uranus.
The blue-green planet already has 27 confirmed moons and the new addition is the first found for the planet in 20 years.
Another two new moons were spotted around Neptune.
That planet already has 14 confirmed moons, including one called Triton, which is almost the same size as ours and has active volcanoes.
One of Neptune’s new moons is being hailed as the faintest ever found by ground-based telescopes.
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center recently announced this new discoveries.
“The three newly discovered moons are the faintest ever found around these two ice giant planets using ground-based telescopes,” said Scott S. Sheppard of Carnegie Science.
“Special image processing was required to make such faint objects visible.”
The new Uranus moon is provisionally called S/2023 U1.
It is thought to be the smallest moon to orbit the planet.
Ultimately, S/2023 U1 will be given a Shakespearean name, as is common when naming Uranian moons.
Sheppard discovered S/2023 U1 last November while using telescopes at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
In December 2023, he made follow-up observations to confirm the discovery.
He used the same Magellan telescope to discover one of Neptune’s new moons.
A team including David Tholen of the University of Hawaii, Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University and Patryk Sofia Lykawa of Kindai University helped Sheppard confirm Neptune’s second moon.
Both objects were first spotted in 2021, but were not confirmed as new moons for the planet.
The brightest of the Neptunian moons is tentatively named S/2002 N5 and is about 23 kilometers wide.
S/2021 N1 is the name of the second smaller new moon that is 14 kilometers wide.
Ultimately, as is tradition, both moons will be named after one of the fifty Nereid sea goddesses from Greek mythology.
“Once S/2002 N5’s orbit around Neptune was determined using the 2021, 2022 and 2023 observations, it was traced back to an object spotted near Neptune in 2003, but lost before it could be confirmed that it was in orbited the planet,” Sheppard said. .
The scientists used several time-consuming exposure techniques to discover the moon.
“Because the moons move in just a few minutes relative to the background stars and galaxies, single long exposures are not ideal for capturing deep images of moving objects,” Sheppard explains.
“By combining these multiple exposures into layers, stars and galaxies will appear with trails behind them, and moving objects similar to the host planet will be seen as point sources, bringing the moons out from behind the background noise in the images.”
It is hoped that finding new moons will teach us more about the history of our solar system.