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

Many Moons

[WeaponOfChoice]

I used to think it'd be cool to have more than one obviously visible moon in the sky. 21 may be a bit much but it'd certainly make the sky interesting.

Thinking about it, 21 significant orbital bodies accompanying a planet the size of our own would create nightmares for people trying to predict the tides, and we'd have to get some pretty serious seismic activity from any significant alignment.

Even worse some form of collision is almost inevitable over the full expanse of time, moons ricocheting like billiards around the sky [joking].

Give a lot of options for moon bases too - countries could argue over who gets the biggest or best situated. I guess we'd lose the use of the L points as a side effect though (or there'd be L orbits weaving monstrously complicated paths though the orbits of the moons)...