Saturn Gains 128 New Moons, Bringing Its Total to 274
Posted on: Mar 12, 2025 02:43 IST | Posted by: Nytimes
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The objects around the ringed major planet ar tiny, but some of them may feature formed comparatively recently in the solar system’s history.
Jonathan O’Callaghan reported on an earlier discovery of 62 moons around Saturn in 2023.
Astronomers say they have discovered more than 100 new moons around Saturn, possibly the result of cosmic smashups that left debris in the planet’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago.
The gas giant planets of our solar system have many moons, which are defined as objects that orbit around planets or other bodies that are not stars. Jupiter has 95 known moons, Uranus 28, and Neptune 16. The 128 in the latest haul around Saturn bring its total to 274.
“It’s the largest batch of new moons,” said Mike Alexandersen at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, an author of a paper announcing the discovery that will be published in the days ahead in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Many of these moons are rocks only a few miles across — small compared with our moon, which is 2,159 miles across. But as long as they have trackable orbits around their parent body, the scientists who catalog objects in the solar system consider them to be moons. That is the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union, which ratified the 128 new moons of Saturn on Tuessday.
The forthcoming paper’s lead author, Edward Ashton of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, will have naming rights for the objects.
“Whoever discovers them gets the right to name them,” said Dr. Alexandersen, who works with the International Astronomical Union to confirm the existence of objects in the solar system. The current naming scheme for moons on Saturn is based on characters from Norse and other mythology.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere in September 2017, after 20 years in space.
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