The moons were revealed after four nights of observation using the world's largest electronic camera which was mounted on the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope located in Hawaii. The electronic camera , known as CFH12k, allowed the research team to cover the entire region around Uranus searching between five million and 100 million kilometres out from the planet

The discovery brings the total number of moons around Uranus to 20 which now surpasses Saturn as the planet with the largest number of known moons. The two new moons are smaller and fainter than the others measuring about 20 kilometres in diameter and orbiting some 10 to 25 million kilometres from the planet's centre

Kavelaar says he is anxious to complete more research and analysis to determine if there is a common formation history between the new moons and two others he and Brett Gladman discovered in 1997

The astronomy team includes Brett Gladman, Jean-Marc Petit and Hans Scholl of the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur and Matt Holman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics