![]() ![]() Mark Showalter, a researcher at SETI Institute in California, told New Scientist (opens in new tab) that the moons' presence is "certainly a very plausible possibility." Chancia said that Showalter and others can investigate data about Uranus from the Hubble Space Telescope to try to scope out traces of the two new moons. "Finding a small moon like this that could be helping to keep the alpha and beta rings confined and shed some light on that story could help - or just confuse things more," Chancia said. The moons Cordelia and Ophelia appear to keep Uranus' outermost, widest ring relatively confined between around 20 and 100 km (12 and 62 miles) in width, for instance, and a similar setup may corral one of Saturn's rings. Researchers aren't sure how the rings stay narrow over time when the particle collisions should cause them to spread out, or how long they've existed around the planet, but the actions of "shepherd moons" orbiting along with the rings may be keeping some of them in line. Eight of Uranus' nine main rings are very thin, less than 10 km (6 miles) thick, Chancia said. Understanding Uranus' rings, and the moons interacting with them, can help reveal more about the planet's gravity and interior structure. "The most likely scenario is that it's a small object that's right at the level of the noise in the images." That means the moons are likely smaller than 3 miles (5 kilometers) in radius, which would make them smaller and closer in than any of Uranus' known moons. "Based on the amplitude of this wave pattern and that distance from the ring … and our attempts to find the moon in images, it basically points toward if they exist, they're pretty tiny," Chancia said. While other known moons were highlighted using this method, the potential new moonlets did not materialize. To try and verify the new moons' existence, Chancia combined Voyager 2 images of the planet in which the moons should have been visible. Plugging the data into a model used to discover one of Saturn's moons, the group found that the waves could be caused by small moonlets orbiting just outside each of the rings.Īlthough the moons would have moved on from their exact positions 30 years ago, the waves reveal their approximate masses and radial locations, which likely still apply today, Chancia said. The waves' composition seem to reflect the rippling wake of a passing moon, Chancia said.
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