Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons of the gas giant Saturn, which formed in orbit around the planet 100 million years ago. Now there are only 274.
This was reported by the International Astronomical Union.
Many of the newly discovered moons are rocks just a few kilometers across. Thatʼs tiny compared to the Moon, which is about 3,474 kilometers across. But as long as these bodies orbit Saturn, they will be considered moons.
The lead author of a forthcoming paper describing the discovery is Edward Ashton from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. It will be given the right to name the objects. The current naming scheme for Saturnʼs moons is based on characters from Norse and other mythologies.
The moons were discovered in 2023 using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Ashton and his colleagues observed areas of space near Saturn, and over time this allowed them to track the movements of previously unknown moons. Scientists had to prove that the object was in orbit around the gas giant.
All of the discovered moons are irregular, meaning they are small, rotate at a high angle to Saturnʼs equator, and often orbit the planet in the opposite direction to its larger moons. They are located from 10.5 million kilometers to 29 million kilometers from the planet. For comparison, Saturnʼs rings extend for about 442,570 kilometers, and the main moons (Titan, Enceladus, and others) are up to 3.2 million kilometers away.
The existence of so many moons around Saturn (274) suggests numerous large-scale collisions in space. The planet captured these irregular moons into orbit at some point in its history—some of them may be fragments of larger objects that collided elsewhere in the Solar System.
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