The Short Answer
Uranus has 29 known moons. That count only recently ticked up, when the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a tiny new moon in early 2025, and like the other outer planets, the number tends to keep climbing as our telescopes get sharper. Uranus stands out from every other planet in one charming way, all of its moons are named after characters from literature rather than mythology.
Tilted almost completely on its side and drifting far out in the cold, Uranus is easy to overlook. But its family of moons is one of the most interesting in the solar system, packed with battered ice worlds, record-breaking cliffs, and a naming scheme borrowed straight from Shakespeare. Let’s count them up and meet the ice giant’s literary crew.
Twenty-Nine Moons, and Counting
The current tally of 29 moons makes Uranus a middleweight in the moon stakes. It’s far behind the huge families of the two gas giants, which we cover in our guides to how many moons Jupiter has and how many moons Saturn has, yet comfortably ahead of the inner planets.
That number isn’t fixed. For years the count sat at 27, then 28, and in February 2025 the Webb telescope picked out a tiny moon, only about ten kilometres across, that even Voyager 2 had missed when it flew past in 1986. Its temporary name is S/2025 U1, and it’ll eventually get a proper literary name like the rest. Spotting such small, dark moons at nearly three billion kilometres away is remarkably hard, so more may well turn up.
The Five Big Ones
Out of all 29, five moons stand out as genuinely large worlds, while the rest are small. These five, in order of size, are Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel, and Miranda. Titania is the biggest, at roughly 1,580 kilometres across, though even it is less than half the width of our own Moon. All five are dark, icy-and-rocky bodies, cold and cratered from billions of years of impacts.
Their discovery stretches across centuries. Titania and Oberon were found by William Herschel in 1787, the very same astronomer who had discovered Uranus itself just a few years earlier. Ariel and Umbriel followed in 1851, and little Miranda wasn’t spotted until 1948. Then Voyager 2 swept through in 1986 and revealed ten more small inner moons in one visit, with Hubble, ground telescopes, and now Webb steadily adding the rest.
The Moon That Looks Stitched Together
If one Uranian moon deserves the spotlight, it’s Miranda. The smallest of the five majors, it has one of the most bizarre, jumbled surfaces in the entire solar system. It looks like a world that was smashed apart and clumsily reassembled, with wildly mismatched terrains crammed together, grooved regions butting up against smooth plains and chaotic ridges.
Miranda is also home to a genuine record holder. A towering scarp called Verona Rupes is thought to be the tallest known cliff anywhere in the solar system, plunging as much as 20 kilometres, more than ten times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Thanks to Miranda’s feeble gravity, a pebble dropped from the top would take several minutes to reach the bottom. It’s exactly the kind of oddball world that makes the outer solar system so endlessly surprising.
Why the Moons Orbit Sideways
Here’s the quirk that ties the whole system together. Uranus is tipped over at a staggering angle of about 98 degrees, meaning it essentially rolls around the Sun on its side rather than spinning upright like the other planets. That extreme tilt drags its entire family of moons and rings along with it.
So while Saturn’s rings and moons circle it more or less horizontally, Uranus and its whole retinue are turned vertically, appearing to orbit up and over the poles rather than around the equator. You can see it clearly in the Webb image above, where the rings stand upright like a target. It’s one of the strangest configurations among the planets, and it makes Uranus feel like a world knocked permanently off balance. For more on the tilted ice giant and its distant, frigid orbit, our complete guide to Uranus’s distance from the Sun is a good companion read.
A Cast Pulled From Literature
One last thing sets Uranus apart. Every other planet names its moons after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. Uranus breaks the rule entirely. Its moons are named for characters from the plays of William Shakespeare and the poetry of Alexander Pope, which is why the ice giant is orbited by the likes of Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Miranda, Puck, Juliet, and Ophelia. It gives the whole system a wonderfully theatrical feel, a distant stage of frozen worlds bearing the names of English literature’s greatest characters.
So the answer is 29 known moons, five of them large and the rest small, all wrapped in a sideways orbit and named after poets’ and playwrights’ creations. For the very latest official count as new moons are confirmed, NASA’s Uranus moons page is the place to check.
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