Astronomers have identified 128 additional moons orbiting Saturn, securing its position as the planet with the most moons in the solar system by a wide margin.
Previously, Jupiter held the title of "moon king," but Saturn now boasts a total of 274 moons—nearly double the combined count of all other planets. The research team, who had already detected 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, pursued further observations in 2023 after spotting subtle signs of even more moons, reports The Guardian.
“Sure enough, we found 128 new moons,” said the lead researcher, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sincia in Taiwan. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.”
There are 95 moons of Jupiter with confirmed orbits as of February 5, 2024.
The moons have been formally recognised by the International Astronomical Union this week and, for now, have been assigned strings of numbers and letters. They will eventually be given names based on Gallic, Norse and Canadian Inuit gods, in keeping with convention for Saturn’s moons.
Most of the new moons fall in the Norse cluster, meaning astronomers are now on the hunt for dozens of obscure Viking deities. “Eventually the criteria may have to be relaxed a bit,” Ashton said.
Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn using the "shift and stack" technique, which combines sequential images to detect faint objects.
These irregular moons, shaped like potatoes and just a few kilometers across, push Saturn’s total to 274—nearly double that of all other planets combined. Despite the impressive tally, scientists acknowledge that current technology may have reached its limit for detecting moons around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Most of these moons are grouped together, suggesting they are fragments of larger objects that shattered due to violent collisions within the last 100 million years. Their large, tilted orbits hint at chaotic events in the early solar system, where unstable planetary movements and frequent impacts were common.
Understanding Saturn’s moons may also shed light on the origin of its rings, possibly formed when a moon was torn apart by the planet’s gravity.
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft is set to fly by Mars’s smallest moon, Deimos, and capture images of its larger moon, Phobos, before continuing its mission to survey the asteroid Dimorphos. The goal is to develop technology to deflect asteroids that might threaten Earth.
Bd-pratidin English/FNC
