These instruments have spotted moons that were too small and dark even for Voyager 2 to see on its flyby mission and have raised the total of known Uranian moons to 27.
This is no mean feat as these bodies are extremely dark, "blacker than asphalt" according to NASA, are located 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km) away from the sun, and also have diameters as small as 8 to 10 miles (12 to 16 km). Since then the task of discovering Uranus' moons has fallen to the Hubble Space Telescope and improved ground-based telescopes. These moons were Juliet, Puck, Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Desdemona, Portia, Rosalind, Cressida, and Belinda. Making its flyby of the Uranian system Voyager 2 tripled the number of known moons all with diameters of between 16 and 96 miles (26 and 154 kilometers) according to NASA (opens in new tab).
In 1986 the slow period of Uranian moon discoveries would be offset by a burst of discoveries. The next Uranus moon was not discovered until almost a century later when Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper found the fifth moon, Miranda, in 1948. The next two moons of Uranus (opens in new tab) to be discovered, Ariel and Umbriel, were spotted by English astronomer William Lassell in 1851. Herschel had discovered Uranus itself six years earlier in March 1781 (opens in new tab). The first moons of Uranus to be discovered (opens in new tab), Oberon and Titania, were found by German-born astronomer William Herschel in 1787. The moons of Uranus also have unique names in the solar system, Whereas the normal naming convention is for celestial objects to share monikers with mythical figures, instead, most of Uranus' moons are named are characters created by William Shakespeare, with only a couple taking their names from the works of Alexander Pope.
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