Saturn is one of the most interesting planets in the solar system. The rings formed by billions of asteroids and comets, which ended up locked in the orbit. This could be easily mistaken by a Debris Disk – a cloud of dust around recent formed planets, and only when it disappears a cosmic body can be classified as a planet. This is not the case here. On the other hand, there are a couple of hundreds of natural satellites around the planet, more than scientists anticipated.
Earth is not the only planet with a moon
Unlike on Earth where it has only one moon, other planets can have multiple. Jupiter, for example, has 95 moons – some bigger than our planet. They are not habitable and one of them, Io, has lava lakes underneath the surface – what hints it might a have an underground pocket with more lava than our planet.
Other planets like Mars, Neptune, Uranus: all have multiple natural satellites in orbit. They may not influence on the atmosphere like Earth’s moon does, but it still classified as a moon – and until recently Jupiter was the planet with more moons in the solar system. Not anymore. Scientists have discovered that Saturn has hundreds of small natural satellites.
Saturn has more moons than all planets together
Saturn having 126 moons was impressive, but scientists were wrong about these numbers. In 2023, a group of astronomers from Taiwan, Canada, the U.S., and France spotted 128 new moons orbiting the planet — nearly doubling the total count to 274. That puts Jupiter’s 95 moons in second place.
The team made the discovery using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Even though they found the moons in 2023, they were only officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union — the organization responsible for confirming celestial discoveries — in March of the following year.
Most of these moons are very small, just a few kilometers across. For comparison, our moon is over 3,400 kilometers wide. Despite their size, they follow a clear path around Saturn, which is what qualifies them as official moons. According to Brett Gladman, a physics and astronomy professor at the University of British Columbia, it’s likely that many of these tiny moons were once part of larger ones. Over time, they probably broke apart after crashing into either other moons or passing comets.
More moons on the horizon in the future
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time the team added to Saturn’s moon count. Between 2019 and 2021, their work with the same telescope led to the discovery of 62 other moons. Because they suspected there were still more to be found, the researchers returned to the same parts of the sky during three straight months in 2023. And sure enough — 128 more moons showed up. That’s according to Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica, who helped lead the research.
It’s first moon, Titan, was discovered back in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens. Then, Jean-Dominique Cassini added a few more: Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, and Tethys. A century later, in 1789, William Herschel found Mimas and Enceladus. The discoveries don’t stop, and there might be thousands of moons we can’t see due to the technology of our time – but this have changed in the last 400 years.
Technology advancements revealed the moons
Over the last 200 years, tools like photography, giant telescopes, and space probes (such as Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and Cassini) helped astronomers find even more moons orbiting the planet. But now, Ashton says we may be reaching the limit of what today’s technology can detect around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Future discoveries might only come when newer, more advanced instruments are available to search the deep space.