Saturn has 128 new moons – more than the rest of the planets combined

Another 128 moons have been discovered Circular Saturn, bringing the planet’s total to 274 – more than there are around all the other planets in our solar system combined. But when progress in telescope technology allows us to gradually less planetary objects, astronomers face a problem: How small can a moon before it is just a cliff?

Edward Ashton at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan and his colleagues found the new moons with the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope that revealed dozens that have previously avoided astronomers. They took hours of pictures of Saturn, adjusted them for the planet’s movement through the sky and stacked them on top of each other to reveal objects that would otherwise be too weak to see.

All the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometers in diameter and have probably been formed a hundred million or even billions of years ago in collisions between larger moons, says Ashton.

“These are little little cliffs floating in the room, some people may not think it is an achievement,” says Ashton. “But I think it’s important to have a catalog of all objects in the solar system.”

Despite the wealth of data collected by his team, these latest moons still appear only as “unclear clumps,” says Ashton. There are more powerful telescopes that could potentially solve the moon moons, Although many have smaller fields of view, which would mean taking many more pictures, he says.

The newly discovered moons have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and Ashton and his team Now get the right to name them. Ashton, who is Canadian, says he has approached a representative from Canada’s indigenous peoples of suggestions, but also the idea of ​​a kind of public naming competition.

Could there be more movement out there? Researchers have spent decades scanning the area around Saturn with increasingly powerful telescopes that have paid for in recent years. In 2019, 20 new moons were found, and Ashton and Hans Colleugues had already discovered 62 in 2023, separated from the 128 they last found. Ultimately, it is likely that further discoveries will require progress in telescope technology, says Ashton, who believes there are easily thousands of moons in orbit that surround Saturn, and even discount the smaller, cut waste found in the planet’s rings.

Mike Alexandersen at the Minor Planet Center, which logs planetary bodies for IAU, says there are probably many more moons that are not yet found in our solar system, as telescopes improvements allow them to see smaller objects. He says decisions need to be made about what does and will not be like a moon.

“I know IAU decided that because of the number of moons that probably exist, they do not go to prioritize naming something less than 1 kilometer. But it’s not the same as not to regain it as a moon, ”says Alexandersen. “They will probably only name it if a spacecraft visits it.”

He suggested that the cutoffet between what is a moon and what is just a rock party that constitutes a planetary excess is likely to be where between 1 kilometer and 1 meter in diameter. “In the end, it probably won’t be my decision, it will be IAU that makes up some cutoff that will be or less controversial – just like what is a planet or not. And it’s probably to be a relatively judge, ”says Alexandersen.

Elizabeth Day at Imperial College London says that one day there may even be commercial reasons for having a map of the solar system. “” “We may want to extract resources from asteroids and moons in the solar system, so we have a great understanding of what is how important to it, ”says Day.