128 New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn in Mindblowing Discovery
The race between Jupiter and Saturn for the most moons in the Solar System may have just finally come screeching to a halt.
A team of scientists has found a whopping 128 previously unknown moons hanging around Saturn, in a discovery officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union. This brings the planet's total number of known moons to 274, leaving Jupiter, with its mere 95 moons, in the dust.
The first hint that there were more moons awaiting discovery came between 2019 and 2021, when 62 such objects were identified. Other small objects were also spotted at the time that couldn't yet be designated.
"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," says astronomer Edward Ashton of Academia Sincia in Taiwan.
"Sure enough, we found 128 new moons. Based on our projections, I don't think Jupiter will ever catch up."
These moons, to be clear, are not like Earth's Moon, nice and large and pleasingly spherical. They are tiny moonlets, all blobby and potato-shaped, just a few kilometers across – what are known as irregular moons.
The researchers believe that they originally comprised a small group of objects captured by gravity in Saturn's orbit early in the Solar System's history. A subsequent series of collisions would have smashed them to moony bits, resulting in the preponderance of small rocks the astronomers have found.
In fact, they believe a collision must have taken place as recently as 100 million years ago, which is a very short eyeblink of time for a planet. The location of the moons, too, within the Norse group of Saturn's moons, suggests that this is the place where the recent collision occurred.
The Norse group are moons that orbit in a retrograde direction, at inclined angles, and on elliptical paths, outside Saturn's rings. Like the newly discovered moons, they, too, are relatively potatoey.
Potatoes. Rings. Sounds familiar, somehow…
One haul of 64 moons has been detailed in a new paper submitted to the Planetary Science Journal. The preprint is available on arXiv.
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