Moth—named for William Shakespeare’s mischievous dream-sprite—is the smallest moon ever caught lurking around Uranus. It circles the ice giant every 9.6 hours, moving so stealthily through the dark that only a telescope a million miles away, positioned by a stroke of astronomical good fortune, could spot it. A world this small shouldn’t exist anymore. By all rights, it should have been ground into glittering dust ages ago by the brutal tides and gravitational crosswinds of Uranus’s crowded inner realm.
But Moth remains.
It survives.
It slips through the rings like a rumor whispered between evanescent celestial beings.
And the discovery shakes more than poetic nerves. If Moth is out there, then so are others—micro-moons, shards and strays and half-formed worlds hiding in the Uranian gloom. Its orbit hints at a delicate gravitational choreography that defies the old models. Some astronomers say these tiny bodies corral ring material; others swear they’re the shattered bones of ancient collisions, ghost fragments still circling the ice giant in mute procession.
Whatever the truth, Moth reminds us that we’re still amateurs in our own cosmic neighborhood. Forty years after Voyager 2 breezed past Uranus, a moon only six miles wide sat in the dark, unseen and unbothered—waiting for a new century, sharper eyes, and a little bit of luck to finally bring it into the light.
Richard La Rosa ~ 12 / 3 / 2025
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The moon described above is real. It was discovered on February 2, 2025, when the James Webb Space Telescope turned its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) toward Uranus and its rings and caught a faint point of light hiding in the glare. The object—currently designated S/2025 U1—is only about 6 miles (10 km) across, making it the smallest Uranian moon detected to date. It moves in the planet’s equatorial plane, orbiting roughly 35,000 miles (56,330 km) from Uranus’s center, tucked neatly between the known moons Ophelia and Bianca.
Because S/2025 U1 lacks an official name, I’ve taken the liberty of calling it Moth, for a science fiction story I’m writing. The choice is not arbitrary.
Shakespeare’s Moth, pronounced “mote” in Elizabethan English, is one of Titania’s tiny fairy attendants in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: small enough to overlook and quick enough to dart between worlds. Given that Uranus’s moons have been named after Shakespearean characters for more than two centuries, choosing Moth feels less like invention and more like uncovering a name that was waiting patiently for someone to notice it.
And really—there is no better name for the faintest moon ever found in the Uranian system than one that, when pronounced, literally means “a speck.”