Saturn Crushes Jupiter’s Moon Record As Astronomers Unveil 128 New Moons

Before 2023, Jupiter was hailed as the moon king in our Milky Way galaxy. However, since May 2023, astronomers have been discovering more Saturn moons. Astronomers made the most recent discovery his year, bringing the total number of moons orbiting the planet to a whopping 274.

Saturn Crowned The Undeniable Moon King Of The Milky Way Galaxy

In a recent speech, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, announced the finding of new moons orbiting the “Ringed Planet”. Speaking on the discovery, Dr Ashton said “Sure enough, we found 128 new moons.” This adds to the previous 146 moons that orbit the Ringed Planet.

In May 2023, Saturn overthrew Jupiter as the planet with the most moons after a discovery of 62 new moons was made by a team of astronomers. This discovery brought the number of moons on the planet up to 146.

Currently, Jupiter has only 95 moons, and with the discovery bringing Saturn’s moons up to 274, Dr Ashton is pretty sure that Jupiter won’t “ever catch up.” Following the discovery of the 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, the International Astronomical Union gave a formal recognition of this finding.

All new moons have now been assigned strings of numbers and letters for easy identification. The naming of these moons will be done at a later date using the Gallic, Norse, and Canadian Inuit gods.

So, if you are an astronomy geek, you can expect to discover new names of moons in no distant time. Scientists hope that the discovery of these new moons sheds more light on the origin of Saturn’s rings, which are believed to be the result of the ripping apart of one of the planet’s moons.

How Were The New Saturn Moons Discovered

In order to find these new moons, astronomers had to rely on a technique known as “shift and stack”. Here, astronomers acquire sequential images of distinct traces that the moon creates as it moves across the sky.

After gathering these traces, astronomers then combine them together to make the moon bright enough for detection. However, there might be some concerns regarding the 128 new moons that have been discovered orbiting Saturn.

This is because these moons are irregular, potato-shaped, and relatively small. Regarding this, Dr Ashton says he isn’t sure that “there’s a proper definition for what is classed as a moon” and argues that there should be a proper definition of a moon.

Professor Brett Gladman, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, also says that these new moons are likely “fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions.” These collisions might have been with “other Saturnian moons or with passing comets.”

More studies on these new moons will help clarify their origin. However, Dr Ashton is sure that the astronomy team has hit its limit for moon detection around Saturn and other larger planets.