Ferdinand, a moon of Uranus
12,987,254 miles
12 miles
Ferdinand is the most distant known moon of Uranus and follows a retrograde orbit, travelling in the opposite direction to the planet’s rotation. At around 21 kilometres (13 miles) in diameter, it is a small and faint irregular moon.
Ferdinand was discovered in 2001 by Matthew J. Holman and J. J. Kavelaars, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawaii. Because of its extreme distance from Uranus, it takes almost eight Earth years to complete a single orbit.
Its retrograde, inclined, and elongated path suggests that Ferdinand is a captured object, possibly originating in the Kuiper Belt or as a leftover from the early Solar System. Its capture history may be linked to other distant Uranian moons, although its orbit is more extreme than most.
Ferdinand is named after the son of Alonso, the King of Naples, in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. After being shipwrecked by Prospero’s magical storm, Ferdinand meets and falls in love with Miranda. Their romance becomes a central thread in the play, symbolising reconciliation and a hopeful future. The name follows Uranus’s convention of taking characters from Shakespeare’s plays and Alexander Pope’s poetry, with Ferdinand completing the group of major Tempest characters represented among Uranus’s moons.
