Desdemona (moon)

Desdemona is one of the smaller moons that goes around the planet Uranus. It was found in 1986 when scientists studied pictures sent back by the spacecraft Voyager 2. At first, it was called S/1986 U 6 before it was named Desdemona, after the wife of Othello in a play by William Shakespeare.

Desdemona is part of a group of moons called the Portia group. This group includes moons such as Bianca, Cressida, Juliet, and Portia. These moons travel similar paths around Uranus and show similar patterns of getting brighter and darker when seen from far away. Desdemona is about 90 kilometers long and 54 kilometers wide, but there is still much we do not know about it.

In the pictures from Voyager 2, Desdemona looks stretched out, with one side longer than the other, always pointing toward Uranus. Its surface looks gray. Scientists think that, in the very far future—maybe in the next 100 million years—Desdemona might bump into one of its nearby moons, such as Cressida or Juliet. There is also a minor planet named 666 Desdemona.