Ice Giant Uranus Might Have Two Small Dark Moons Hiding Behind It According To Some Astronomers

The ice giant, Uranus, has already got a lot more moons than our lovely planet Earth, 26 more to exist exact and co-ordinate to a new finding information technology may have more. The ice behemothic has 27 known moons and according to new data it has two more pocket-sized moons that no one has ever seen. The number of moons Uranus has is even so a lot less than its neighbors Jupiter and Saturn have, which are 67 and 62 moons respectively. But then again Uranus is a lot smaller in size equally compared to the gas giants too.

Astronomers discovered these two moons located behind Uranus later they re-examined old information that was collected by NASA decades ago with the space probe Voyager ii. During the 1986 probe astronomers found the number of Uranian moons to be three times more than previously imagined and since then they accept believed that only 27 moons orbit the ice giant.

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Two more small, night satellites orbit Uranus

Two planetary scientists from the University of Idaho'south Moscow campus, Rob Chancia and Matthew Hedman, were the ones who made the discovery. They were re-examining Voyager 2's erstwhile data and found the two "exciting discoveries".

"These moons are pretty tiny," says Chancia,

They are then tiny that they only measure between four to 14 kilometers in diameter if they do exist. This explains why the Voyager ii might accept non seen them clearly even though "at least four of Saturn'due south moons are even smaller".

The fact that these two moons exist is "certainly a very plausible possibility", says Marking Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. SETI has previously managed to find moons around Neptune, Uranus and other outer planets.

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Now Showalter and his colleagues at SETI will be examining this discovery further with the use of the Hubble telescope. If they actually do exist and then the Hubble is the 'best bet' at confirming the beingness of these pocket-sized satellites.

There's and so much yet unknown about the ice behemothic and it has been relatively unexplored as compared to Jupiter and Saturn, which accept the Juno, Cassini and Galelio missions to study them. Hopefully we will have a divide mission for Uranus too; it volition be very exciting to see what the water ice behemothic holds. If the Hubble is unable to confirm the being of the moon then maybe one twenty-four hour period a Uranian orbiter could really confirm or deny the existence of these moons' altogether.