Saturn has overtaken Jupiter as the planet with the most known moons in the solar system. Astronomers have announced a bumper crop of 62 new moons orbiting the ringed planet, pushing its total to well over 100.
We Earthlings are used to only having one moon (with the occasional second), but the average is much higher. Mars has two, and the gas and ice giants have dozens each. Jupiter usually leads the race, but Saturn has been known to overtake it from time to time. From late 2019, Saturn officially had 82 to Jupiter’s 79, but a few extra studies pushed Jupiter’s tally to 95 earlier this year.
Now, an international team of astronomers has handed the ringed planet the crown once again, with a huge haul of 62 new moons pushing it to a grand total of 145 – that’s 50 more than Jupiter. And before you run to comments to tell us that 82 + 62 = 144, one extra moon was found in 2021.
Anyway, the researchers were able to identify these new moons using a technique called “shift and stack,” which has been applied to Neptune and Uranus before but not Saturn. Essentially, a series of images are snapped of the planet and its surrounds. Each sequential image is shifted slightly then stacked, so that moons that are normally too faint to show up in individual images become visible.
After tracking objects of interest over several years, the team was able to confirm its crop of 62, bringing the number of Saturnian moons officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union to 145. All of these newcomers belong to a group called irregular moons, which orbit the planet at long distances, on stretched out and tilted paths.
With the sheer number of small moons in this group, the team hypothesizes that they’re fragments of a much larger moon that was torn apart in the recent past, astronomically speaking.
“As one pushes to the limit of modern telescopes, we are finding increasing evidence that a moderate-sized moon orbiting backwards around Saturn was blown apart something like 100 million years ago,” said Dr. Brett Gladman, an astronomer on the project.
Saturn isn’t expected to hold onto this record for long though. With the upcoming launch of new observatories like Vera Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman, it’s believed Jupiter’s total could swell by hundreds more.
Source: University of British Columbia