Saturn is again the leader in moons: more than 100

sarahjay1 (69)memberin Popular STEM • last year

(NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI https://bit.ly/3LYqGOA)

Saturn now has 28 new satellites, officially.

This increases the number of moons of the giant planet to 118 pieces, which makes it the absolute record holder in the solar system.

For a long time, Jupiter held the record for the number of known satellites in the solar system, followed by Saturn (then Uranus and Neptune).

However, the ongoing search for new satellites of the giant planets led to Saturn bypassing Jupiter in 2019.

But at the beginning of 2023 the number of known satellites of Jupiter increased to 92 and the largest planet in the solar system again took first place.

The place was held even after the recent discovery of seven more moons of Saturn.

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However, since May 4, the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union again began to actively publish new confirmations of the discoveries of Saturn's moons.

Thus, Saturn again became the record holder, now the planet has 118 known satellites.

This abundance of discoveries is due to the results of the search program of the University of British Columbia using the ground-based CFHT telescope in 2019-2021.

The researchers first predicted the existence of a large population of Saturn's irregular moons, and then discovered several dozen candidates in the vicinity of the planet.

The orbits of irregular satellites are more elliptical and more inclined with respect to Saturn than the orbits of ordinary satellites.

The researchers were looking for bodies up to 2.5 kilometers in size, Saturn's moons, up to 1 kilometer in diameter, there may be thousands, but they are much more difficult to detect.

During the search, scientists used the “shift and stack” method, which consists in adding a series of short-exposure images and shifting them relative to each other to compensate for the movement of an object across the sky.

All found satellites have a diameter of 2-5 kilometers, some of them belong to the Inuit, and others to the Scandinavian group, based on the parameters of the orbits.

Also more than 20 new satellites of Saturn will be announced in the coming days.

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