Hunting Moons

Jupiter briefly reigned as the “moon king” of the solar system. 

Its crown is now gone again. Instead, a new study shows that Saturn is now taking up that mantle with a whopping 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined.

The discovery came after a team of astronomers identified 62 new Saturn moons with the Canada France Hawaii telescope. Identifying faint hints of possible even more moons, they kept looking. 

“Sure enough, we found 128 new moons,” said lead researcher Edward Ashton in a statement. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up,” as there are 95 confirmed Jupiter moons as of now. 

The team found the moons using the “shift and stack” method, where they captured sequential images of the moons’ paths across the sky, combining them to enhance the visibility of the fainter moons.  

The 128 new moons discovered are all classified as “irregular moons” – potato-shaped objects just a few kilometers wide. The growing number of such discoveries raises questions about the definition of a moon and could spark future debates over what qualifies as one.  

“I don’t think there’s a proper definition for what is classed as a moon. There should be,” said Ashton, adding that with current technology it is unlikely astronomers will find new moons around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. 

Still, a closer study of these tiny moons could offer scientists insight into a chaotic period in the early solar system, when planets shifted through unstable orbits and collisions were frequent.  

The new moons are grouped in clusters, hinting that many might be fragments of a smaller group of moons originally captured by Saturn’s gravity – meaning they were pulled in from elsewhere, such as from the outer solar system or passing asteroids or comets – and then shattered by violent collisions with other Saturnian moons or comets. 

Understanding the dynamics of Saturn’s moons could provide clues about the origin of its rings, which scientists hypothesized may have formed from a moon torn apart by the planet’s gravity. 

Meanwhile, the new Saturn moons have been formally recognized by the International Astronomical Union and have been assigned numbers and letters while waiting on names based on Gallic, Norse, and Canadian Inuit gods as per the conventions for Saturn’s moons, the Guardian explained.