(EMBARGOED UNTIL:November 27 2001)

Three more minor moons for Uranus

This past summer the Moon hunters were at it again. This time they spent many hours looking in a few select locations around Uranus and Neptune, trying to find ever smaller satellites of those planets.

``The extrordinarily small ones [sic moons of 10-20 km diameter] we found around Saturn convinced us that there should be similarly sized objects around Uranus'' said Kavelaars.

By using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory (located in Chile and operated by the US National Optical Astronomy Observatorty) the team of astronomers (JJ Kavelaars, Matthew Holman, Jean-Marc Petit, Brett Gladman and Dan Milisavljevic) were able to search for objects only a few tens of kilometers across orbiting the planets Uranus and Neptune.

The search technique (developed by Gladman and Kavelaars) has provided many new discoveries of faint objects in the outer solar system. These latest findings appear to support the groups theory that these small satellites are in fact the remnants of a collision between a much larger body, orbiting around Uranus, and a passing comet. The irregular satellites, which have no preferred orbital plane, are likely the chunks of material ejected from the surface of the parent object or objects.

You wont be looking to move to these small bodies anytime but they are providing interesting information about the state of the solar system during the early stages of planet formation. The 3 new discoveries (officially called S 2001 U1 S/2001 U2 and S/2001 U3) are all very small and very faint. So faint that the team is having trouble tracking these objects, even using some of the worlds largest optical telescopes.