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 \u2013 a cloud of dust around recent formed planets, and only when it disappears a cosmic\u00a0body 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.<\/p>\n
Earth is not the only planet with a moon<\/p>\n
Unlike on Earth where it has only one moon, other planets can have multiple. Jupiter, for example, has 95 moons \u2013 some bigger than our planet. They are not habitable and one of them, Io, has lava lakes underneath the surface \u2013 what hints it might a have an underground pocket with more lava than our planet.<\/p>\n
Other planets like Mars, Neptune, Uranus: all have multiple natural satellites in orbit. They may not influence on the atmosphere like Earth\u2019s moon does, but it still classified as a moon \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
Saturn has more moons than all planets together<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 nearly doubling the total count to 274. That puts Jupiter\u2019s 95 moons in second place.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the organization responsible for confirming celestial discoveries \u2014 in March of the following year.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
More moons on the horizon in the future<\/p>\n
Interestingly, this isn\u2019t the first time the team added to Saturn\u2019s moon count.<\/a> 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 \u2014 128 more moons showed up. That\u2019s according to Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica, who helped lead the research.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019t stop, and there might be thousands of moons we can\u2019t see due to the technology of our time \u2013 but this have changed in the last 400 years.<\/p>\n Technology advancements revealed the moons<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saturn is one of the most interesting planets in the solar system. The rings formed by billions of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-31406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}