Which planet has the most moons? Saturn dethrones Jupiter.
The ringed gas giant Saturn has officially replaced Jupiter as the planet in our solar system with the most moons. The International Astronomical Union officially recognized 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, bringing the new total up to 274 moons.
The moons were discovered by a group of astronomers from Taiwan, Canada, the United States, and France. Between 2019 and 2021, they used the Canada France Hawaii Telescope to repeatedly monitor the sky around Saturn. With this telescope, they could see the region in minute detail. They also combined multiple images together to strengthen an astronomical object's signal and make it more clear. Initially, they spotted 62 moons and a larger number of objects that they could not designate at the time.
'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,' Edward Ashton, the lead researcher and a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sincia in Taiwan, said in a statement. 'Sure enough, we found 128 new moons. Based on our projections, I don't think Jupiter will ever catch up.'
As of February 2024, Jupiter has 95 moons. By comparison, Mercury, and Venus are moonless, Earth has one moon, and Mars has two. Uranus and Neptune have 28 and 16 known moons, respectively. Despite not technically being a planet anymore, Pluto has five moons.
The 128 new Saturnian satellites are all considered irregular moons. These are objects that orbit their host planet on an elliptical, inclined, or backwards path. They also tend to have been captured by their host planet early on in the history of the solar system.
'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,' University of British Columbia astronomer Brett Gladman said in a statement.
A key mystery within Saturn's irregular moon system was a motivator for this latest moon searching mission. With Saturn's high number of small moons compared to larger moons, a collision somewhere with the Saturn system must have occurred within the last 100 million years. In astronomical terms, 100 million years is pretty recent. According to Gladman, any longer and these moons would have collided with each other and broken apart. The resulting bumper car-like collisions would have reduced the ratio of smaller moons to larger ones.
[Related: Saturn has a slushy core and rings that wiggle. ]
Most of the newly discovered moons are located near the Mundilfari subgroup of Saturn's moons. The team believes that given the size, number, and orbital concentration of these new moons, the Mundilfari subgroup is likely where this cosmic collision occurred.
For now, this specific team's moon-spotting days may be behind them.
'With current technology I don't think we can do much better than what has already been done for moons around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,' said Ashton.
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