A team of astrophysicists from the American research center Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), led by Moroccan scientist Maryame El Moutamid, has uncovered a previously unknown celestial body orbiting Uranus, the seventh planet in our solar system. El Moutamid and her team, consisting of seven multidisciplinary scientists, identified this small satellite during an observation program using NASA's powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This discovery, officially announced this week by SwRI, emerged from analyzing a series of images captured on February 2, 2025, with NASA's telescope. It increases the total number of known Uranian satellites to 29. «This is an important discovery for understanding Uranus's compact system, where the satellites are very close to each other, creating gravitational disturbances that make the system unstable in the long term,» emphasized Dr. El Moutamid in an interview with MAP. In the long term, she explained, these satellites are destined to collide, forming larger rings that will eventually spread out and give rise to new satellites, establishing a repetitive cycle approximately every 50 million years. At 41, the Moroccan researcher serves as a principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and leads an observation program of Uranus conducted by the JWST. Reflecting on her academic and scientific journey, Maryame El Moutamid shared that she attended Moroccan public schools before moving to France, where she earned her doctorate, and then to the United States, where she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Cornell University in New York. This native of Essaouira praised the «quality» of the Moroccan educational system. She encourages young Moroccans interested in space to «go for it, never underestimate themselves, and seize opportunities to work with scientists from around the world». Discussing the specifics of her new discovery, she noted that this celestial body, just 10 km in diameter, is «the smallest satellite of Uranus discovered to date». It was detected through a series of 10 long exposures, each lasting 40 minutes, using a near-infrared camera designed to capture light in the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond visible light. The new satellite is situated at the edge of Uranus's inner rings, about 56,250 km from the planet's center in the equatorial plane, between the orbits of Ophelia and Bianca. Maryame El Moutamid revealed her medium-term ambition to lead an unmanned space mission around Saturn to study its rings and satellites.
