How Many Moons Does the Planet Uranus Have and How Did the Moons Orbiting Uranus Get Their Names?
Before the space age, we knew of five satellites orbiting Uranus: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon.
The names came from the works of Shakespeare and the poet Alexander Pope.
Ten more moons, discovered by the spacecraft Voyager in 1986, are small, dark bodies of methane ices.
Of the fifteen known moons during the flyby of Voyager, only Titania and Oberon, the two largest, are visible to the naked eye.
The moons are ice-rock conglomerates composed of roughly fifty percent ice and fifty percent rock.
Since 1997 nine distant irregular moons have been identified orbiting Uranus using ground-based telescopes. Cupid and Mab, two small inner moons, were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003.
The last Uranian moon, named Margaret, was discovered in 2008.
