Astronomers have made an exciting discovery: they found over 100 new moons orbiting Saturn. This could be the result of cosmic collisions that created debris in Saturn’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago.
Saturn, like the other gas giants in our solar system, has a fascinating number of moons. Jupiter leads the pack with 95 moons, followed by Uranus with 28, and Neptune with 16. With the latest addition of 128 moons, Saturn now has a total of 274 moons!
Mike Alexandersen from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shared that this is the largest group of new moons discovered at once. This announcement will soon appear in the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Most of these new moons are quite small, measuring only a few miles across. To put that in perspective, our Moon is 2,159 miles wide! Despite their small size, these objects can still be classified as moons as long as they have stable orbits around Saturn. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is in charge of cataloging these celestial objects and officially confirmed the new moons recently.
The lead author of the upcoming research paper, Edward Ashton from the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, will also have the honor of naming these new moons. According to Alexandersen, the discoverer gets to choose the names. Currently, Saturn’s moons are often named after characters from Norse mythology, adding a touch of history and storytelling to our understanding of these distant objects.
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Source linkSaturn (Planet),Space and Astronomy,Research,Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society,Telescopes and Observatories
