Discovery of Stephano

Stephano is a small, dark irregular moon of Uranus, discovered by a team led by Brett Gladman using a large ground-based telescope. It follows a distant retrograde orbit, moving against the direction in which Uranus spins, and is believed to be a captured body rather than one that formed with the planet. It belongs to a family of outer Uranian moons, including Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero and Setebos, that probably share a violent origin in the breakup of larger captured objects. Following the naming convention for Uranus's moons, it carries the name of the drunken butler in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Almost everything known about it comes from telescope observations of its faint motion.

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