Astronomers Confirm There Are 128 New Moons Orbiting Saturn
The discovery of 128 additional moons orbiting Saturn was just confirmed by astronomers working with the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, bringing its total to 274 moons.
Between 2019 and 2021, the team observed Saturn regularly. At first, they found 64 new moons and many more objects. The 64 new moons led to further observations in 2023.
“With the knowledge that these were probably moons and that there were likely even more waiting to be discovered, we revisited the same sky fields for three consecutive months in 2023,” said Dr. Edward Ashton, the lead researcher of the study. “Sure enough, we found 128 moons.”
Jupiter and Saturn have the most moons out of all the planets in our solar system. Currently, Jupiter has 95 known moons, and it is expected that more will be discovered in the future. However, Jupiter will probably never catch up to Saturn.
All of Saturn’s new moons are irregular moons, which means they follow wide, elliptical orbits and are usually highly inclined. Since they are smaller in size, they are likely fragments resulting from collisions with other moons.
“These moons are a few kilometers in size and are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets,” said Dr. Brett Gladman, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s Physics and Astronomy department.
Saturn has many more smaller moons than larger ones, which is what prompted new observations to be made. The small moons were probably pieces of larger ones, indicating that a massive collision in the Saturn system occurred within the last 100 million years.
Most of the moons follow retrograde orbits and are near the Mundilfari moons. Mundilfari is a Norse mythological figure and the name of one of Saturn’s moons and a subgroup of irregular moons orbiting Saturn. The amount of moons near the Mundilfari subgroup suggests that the region was the site of a past collision.
Saturn’s moons and rings are closely tied to each other. Some of its moons shape the rings and are known as “shepherd moons.”
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Moons also create gaps in the rings. Astronomers believe that the rings are the remains of moons that got too close to Saturn and were ripped apart by the planet’s gravity.
For now, the new moons have been assigned a string of letters and numbers to be referred to. Eventually, they will be given proper names. Saturn’s moons are named after Norse, Gallic, and Canadian Inuit gods. These moons will follow the same tradition.
Now, Saturn has 274 moons. As technology improves, astronomers may detect more small moons orbiting the planets in our solar system.
The findings were posted in the preprint server arXiv.
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