New Moon of Uranus Discovered

paulnuyu writes "A group of international astronomers have found a new moon orbitting Uranus. This brings Uranus's total moon count to 21. The newly discovered moon is speculated to be a remaining fragment from a collision that occured when the solar sytem was still forming."

Comments

farther out = more moons?

[Hadlock]

it seems that mars, venus, & mercury all have few or no moons, while on the other side of the asteroid belt, you have planets (sans pluto & really small planets) with moons in the teens to twenty in numbers. why is this?

is most of the space matter in our solar system stuck in the L4, L5 points, and thus doesn't find it's way into the inner regions of the solar system? or is it just that the enormous mass of the farther out planets seems to attract more mass & thus has a higher chance of a rock entering orbit (as a result of a larger margin of error for stable orbit due to the size of the planet). it just seems to be more than coincidental....

or is it just a possiblity that these planets have a particularly large asteroid in an unstable orbit just long enough to discover and document, before it a) leaves orbit or b) gets sucked into the atmosphere?

Caring

[Trusty Penfold]

Are astronomers ever going to stop caring about new satellites? If so, when?

It is obvious that there is all sorts of stuff floating around the solar system, some of which is in orbit around other non-solar objects.

Does knowledge about a 21st moon of a remote planet really increase our understanding of anything?

Re:Caring

[CheshireCatCO]

Does knowledge about a 21st moon of a remote planet really increase our understanding of anything?

I know. As a matter of fact, it does. If we only had a handful of moons to look at, we'd never really know to what extent the trends we see are just statistics of a few and to what extent they reflect real underlying physical processes at work. Each additional moon adds to the statistics. Individually they aren't wildly important. Collectively, larger numers of moons lead to better theories of where this little guys come from. Brett Gladman, who received the annual Urey Prize for the Division for Planetary Sciences this year, gave a talk about irregular satellites. Having been in the audience, I can tell you that having many moons on there made the trends a lot more believeable than had there been only, say, 5 data points.

If you're asking if each new moon is worth of a headline or even a Slashdot story, I'd agree that it really isn't. But if you're wondering if we should bother looking for these moons, I'd have to say yes, absolutely.

Re:Many Moons

[WeaponOfChoice]

Probably should just stick to using the term satellite. Avoids the old 'but is it [?] enough to qualify as a [?]' trap. Won't be as popular with astronomers who like to be able to claim discovery of 'significant' stellar bodies, though I agree that 'moon' insinuates some measure of significance that a 12 mile rock simply does not have. There are asteriods orders of magnitude larger that get less special treatment...