Saturn: the New Moon King of Our Solar System

Astronomers have identified an additional 128 moons orbiting Saturn, bringing its total to 274. The second-largest planet in our solar system now vastly outnumbers Jupiter in the largest number of moons.

“Sure enough, we found 128 new moons,” says the lead researcher, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.”

With 274 moons, Saturn has almost twice as many as all other planets combined. Jupiter has 95 orbiting moons. Formally recognized by the International Astronomical Union, the 128 moons will be given names based on Gallic, Norse, and Canadian Inuit gods, in keeping with convention for Saturn’s moons. The “shift and stack” technique – combining sequential images tracing the moon’s math across the sky to make the moon bright enough to detect – was used to identify the “irregular moons” as they are all potato-shaped objects, just a few kilometers across. This discovery could help scientists to have a better understanding of a turbulent period in the early solar system. These clusters of moons suggest that many were once part of larger objects that collided and shattered within the last 100 million years. Understanding the dynamics of Saturn’s 274 moons could help reveal the origin of the gas giant’s rings. It has been suggested that they are the aftermath of a moon ripped apart by the planet’s gravity.