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.
Unlike the planet/dwarf planet designation, it seems that a moon is a moon no matter its characteristics. That makes a debris field like Saturn quite interesting. Should there be a limit to what a moon is? Based on how number increases as size decreases, there are certainly far more we can't easily detect from Earth.
My thought is projection of orbit stability, which ignores the size but goes directly for whether or not it's a temporary part of the planet's system.
science kind of demands rigorous definitions so i can't pretend to know how this would be accomplished but yes, at least in spirit, a lot of these moons definitely feel like they ought to be called moonlets or a similar term
Moonlet looks to be a term specific for ring-embedded moons (just Ring A?), based on wikipedia for the word and a link from there on a list of them. I don't think these are even included in the list of main moons, but rather are perhaps larger masses of the ring itself that are serving as structure creators with their gravity influence (like the bigger shepherd moons on the edges).
you would have to define temporary. In reality, our moon is leaving making it temporary in a sense.
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.
At least it's a power of two.