Trinculo (moon)
A small, dark, retrograde irregular moon of Uranus.
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Trinculo (Uranus XXI, formerly S/2001 U 1) is a tiny, irregular moon of Uranus that follows a highly elongated and distant orbit. It was spotted on August 13, 2001, by Matthew J. Holman, JJ Kavelaars, and Dan Milisavljevic using the 4.0-meter Víctor M. Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile. This moon was the sixth irregular satellite found circling Uranus. The discovery team was searching for far-off Uranian moons.
They identified Trinculo and three other irregular moons—Francisco, Ferdinand, and Margaret—by applying a computer algorithm that tracked Uranus’s motion and stacked images to bring out faint objects, a method called shift-and-adding. Kavelaars later confirmed the moon’s orbit with the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope on August 25, 2001. To pin down its path, the group observed from the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory and the 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory.
Brian G. Marsden of the Minor Planet Center calculated Trinculo’s orbit and predicted its 2002 location, which allowed Brett Gladman to identify a Uranian moon candidate detected in VLT images taken by Philippe Rousselot and Olivier Mousis on 5 September 2002, which was then confirmed to be Trinculo after Gladman and Tommy Grav investigated images taken earlier by the Blanco telescope on 13 August 2002. The Minor Planet Center announced the discovery on September 30, 2003.
Name
The moon was initially given the provisional designation S/2001 U 1. On December 29, 2005, the International Astronomical Union named it Trinculo, after the drunken jester in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and assigned it the Roman numeral Uranus XXI. Kavelaars later explained in a 2014 interview that the team chose the name because they were “drunk with power,” and that Trinculo’s irregular orbit reminded them of a wandering drunken sailor. Trinculo is an irregular moon, meaning its orbit is wide, elliptical, and steeply inclined compared to Uranus’s regular moons.
Orbit
Such moons are likely captured asteroids. Because they are so far from Uranus, their orbits are easily disturbed by the Sun and other planets, causing them to change significantly over short times. So, a simple elliptical orbit doesn’t describe their long-term motion; instead, astronomers use averaged “proper” orbital elements.
Background
Trinculo was discovered on 13 August 2001 by a group of astronomers searching for distant moons of Uranus. The discovery observations were made at Cerro Tololo Observatory, Chile, using the 4.0-m Víctor M. Blanco Telescope equipped with a wide-field camera. The group identified Trinculo and three other Uranian irregular moons (Francisco, Ferdinand, and Margaret) in telescope images by using a computer algorithm that followed the motion of Uranus and then combined the images to enhance the faint moons—a technique known as shift-and-adding.
Later images obtained by Kavelaars using the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope on 25 August 2001 confirmed that Trinculo was orbiting Uranus. To determine the orbit, the group continued observing from different observatories, including the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory and 8.2-m Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory. Brian G. Marsden helped compute the orbit and provided predictions for its location in 2002, which allowed Gladman to identify a Uranian moon candidate detected in VLT images taken by Philippe Rousselot and Olivier Mousis on 5 September 2002, confirmed to be Trinculo after Gladman and Tommy Grav investigated images taken earlier by the Blanco telescope on 13 August 2002.
The Minor Planet Center announced the discovery on 30 September 2003. Trinculo was named after the drunken jester Trinculo from William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. In a 2014 interview with the Folger Shakespeare Library, Kavelaars remarked that he picked the name because his team was 'drunk with power' and that Trinculo's irregular orbit resembled a wandering drunken sailor. The moon was given the Roman numeral designation Uranus XXI by the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature on 29 December 2005.
Trinculo is an irregular moon of Uranus, thought to be a former asteroid captured during the Solar System's formation. Its orbit is retrograde, meaning it orbits in the opposite direction of Uranus' orbit around the Sun. Over a 10,000-year time period, Trinculo's average semi-major axis is 8.05 million km, with an average orbital period of 2.05 years, an average eccentricity of 0.22, and an average inclination of 167° with respect to the ecliptic.
Its orbital elements fluctuate due to perturbations: semi-major axis varies by up to ±12,200 km, eccentricity by ±0.02, and inclination by ±1°. Orbit simulations performed by Marina Brozović and Robert Jacobson in 2022 found that Trinculo had approached Sycorax within several tens of thousands of kilometers 9,700 years ago. Trinculo is not known to be part of a collisional family or group; its orbit is apparently unique among the known Uranian irregular moons.
More in Moons of Uranus
Elsewhere in Moons of Uranus and Neptune
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Trinculo (moon) (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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