CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The outer reaches of our solar system just got a little more crowded, with astronomers spotting a previously unseen moon circling Uranus.

Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, a team led by the Southwest Research Institute has identified a previously unknown moon orbiting the Ice Giant, expanding the planet's known satellite family to 29.

The moon, which appears to be just six miles wide, was spotted by the telescope's near-infrared camera during observations in February. NASA announced the discovery on Tuesday.

"It's a small moon but a significant discovery, which is something that even NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft didn't see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago," Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist in SwRI's Solar System Science and Exploration Division based in Boulder, Colorado, said in a blog post.

Voyager 2 is a NASA spacecraft that launched in 1977 as part of the Voyager program to explore the outer solar system.

Scientists think the newly discovered moon hid from Voyager 2 and other telescopes for so long because of its faintness and small size.

"No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, and their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons," said Matthew Tiscareno of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who was involved in the discovery.

Uranus's 28 known moons are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. A name for the newly found moon will need to be approved by the International Astronomical Union, the leading authority in assigning official names and designations to astronomical objects.

About half of Uranus' moons are smaller and orbit the planet at closer range. The new addition could hint at more bite-sized moons waiting to be found around Uranus, said Tiscareno.

"There's probably a lot more of them and we just need to keep looking," he said.