While the unending vastness of outer space is basically impossible to comprehend, a newly discovered moon has measurements that our feeble Earth minds can more easily grasp.
The moon, which orbits the planet Uranus, has an estimated diameter of just 6 miles, according to NASA. Its itty-bitty size, which is less than half the distance of a half-marathon, “likely rendered it invisible” to the NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft, but was finally spotted using the James Webb Space Telescope.
“No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, and their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons,” says researcher Matthew Tiscareno, of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “Moreover, the new moon is smaller and much fainter than the smallest of the previously known inner moons, making it likely that even more complexity remains to be discovered.”
Aw, it’s just a little guy. A smol bean.