Portia (moon)

Portia is a small moon that orbits the planet Uranus. It was discovered in 1986 when the spacecraft Voyager 2 sent back pictures. At that time, it was called S/1986 U 1, before being officially named after Portia, a character from William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice.

Portia is the second-largest moon among Uranus’s inner moons, after Puck. It travels around Uranus in a special path that is slowly getting closer to the planet because of Uranus’s gravity. Scientists think that one day Portia might break apart and become part of a ring around Uranus or crash directly into the planet.

Portia is also the name-giver to a group of moons called the Portia group. This group includes moons like Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Rosalind, Cupid, Belinda, and Perdita. All these moons share similar paths and surface properties. Not much is known about Portia except that it is about 156 kilometers long and 126 kilometers wide, and its surface reflects only a small amount of sunlight. Pictures from Voyager 2 show Portia as a stretched-out shape pointing toward Uranus. More recent observations using powerful telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, have found signs of water ice on Portia’s surface.