Space

7444 readers

2 users here now

News and findings about our cosmos.

Subcommunity of Science

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

Astronomers discover 128 new moons orbiting Saturn (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by alyaza to c/space

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system.

Until recently, the "moon king" title was held by Jupiter, but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined. The team behind the discoveries had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope and, having seen faint hints that there were more out there, made further observations in 2023.

"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."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 3 points 2 weeks ago

It won't leave, just slow to a much farther orbit, so that's why I said future projection, or best we can do. Many of these moons seem to be in erratic and retrograde paths, something that can't last even a "short" time, as you'd expect of remnants of breakups or of captured objects.