A group of scientists from all around the world have spotted 62 new moons orbiting Saturn using a brand-new approach. With these new moons, Saturn now has 145 moons, which is more than Jupiter. This discovery can help us to know more about how the system of satellites around Saturn was formed over time.
Recently, an international group of astronomers has made a huge discovery: they have found 62 new moons of Saturn! This makes Saturn the planet with most known moons in our Solar System. The team is lead by Edward Ashton and includes Matthew Beaudoin, Mike Alexandersen, Professor Brett Gladman, and Jean-Marc Petit from Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, UBC’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Observatoire de Besancon, respectively.
In the last two decades, scientists have been looking for moons around Saturn with higher accuracy. For this study, Dr. Ashton’s team used a process called ‘shift and stack’ which has been used to discover Neptune and Uranus moons but not Saturn’s up until now. This technique involved taking lots of pictures in 3 hour intervals from the Canada- France- Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii between 2019 and 2021. By moving and combining the images they were able to see even small moons which were too faint to be seen by themselves – as small as 2.5 kilometers!
A few years ago, Ashton and Beaudoin were students at the University of British Columbia when they did a special kind of search and discovered moons close to Saturn. However, to be sure that it was really a moon and not an asteroid passing nearby, they had to keep track of the object for a few years. Over two years, the team observed 63 objects to establish that these were new moons. One was announced back in 2021, while the rest have recently been announced. The team managed to find some orbits based on past observations from many years before, but those weren’t tracked long enough then to see that they were related to Saturn.
My work tracking moons is like playing a kid’s game called Dot-to-Dot. I have to connect all the pieces of data we have about them and make it into an orbit, but it’s hard because there are lots of games on the same page and you don’t know which dot goes with which game!
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has recently discovered 121 irregular moons that go around Saturn – which is more than double of the amount previously known. Including the 24 regular moons, there are now a total of 145 moons orbiting Saturn! This means that Saturn now holds the record for having the most moons out of all planets in our Solar System with a total of 95 recognized moons. It’s an exciting breakthrough since this hasn’t been done before!
The moons of Saturn don’t always move in the same way. Instead, they tend to clump together into three groups depending on the tilt of their orbits. These groups come from different kinds of mythology and are called the Inuit, Gallic, and Norse group. Scientists noticed that three new moons- called S/2019 S 1, S/2020 S 1, and S/2005 S 4- were part of the Inuit group and had similar orbits to two other bigger irregular moons called Kiviuq and Ijiraq. Most of the newly discovered moons belonged to the Norse segment. Experts think that these groups were created when two or more initially captured moons crashed into each other. By understanding how things are set up around Saturn’s moon system, scientists can learn more about its history as a whole.
Scientists have figured out why the Solar System has so many small moons with orbits that go opposite to the rotation of the planets. It’s because an irregular moon was recently broken into many pieces, which is called ‘Norse Group’ and it happened about 100 million years ago.
Professor Gladman says that using the high-tech telescopes we can see pieces of evidence which tell us that around 100 million years ago, one of Saturn’s moons broke apart. This moon was medium-sized and it moved around Saturn in a backwards pattern.
