Francisco, a moon of Uranus
2,656,978 miles
14 miles
Francisco is one of the outer irregular moons of Uranus and follows a prograde orbit, meaning it travels in the same direction that Uranus spins. With a diameter of only about 22 kilometres (14 miles), it is a tiny, distant satellite compared to Uranus’s larger moons.
Francisco was discovered in 2001 by a team of astronomers led by Matthew J. Holman and J. J. Kavelaars, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawaii. Because it is so far from Uranus and so small, Francisco is very faint, making it a challenging target for telescopes.
As an irregular moon, Francisco is believed to be a captured object, possibly an asteroid or Kuiper Belt body that wandered too close to Uranus and became trapped by the planet’s gravity. Its distant orbit is highly eccentric (elongated) compared to the near-circular paths of Uranus’s large regular moons.
Francisco is named after a minor character in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the play, he is one of Alonso’s noblemen who survives a storm conjured by Prospero’s magic. While he has few lines, his name continues Uranus’s tradition of naming moons after Shakespearean characters.
