Undisputed leader: 274 Saturn moons now known after record discovery
Saturn leads the list of planets with the most moons since 2023. Now that a record discovery was published, it seems to be uncatchable at the top.
Artistic representation of Saturn with some moons
(Image: NASA/GSFC)
A research team has discovered 128 new moons around Saturn during an extensive search using the best technology currently available. The ringed planet now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets in the solar system combined. “I don't think Jupiter will ever catch up,” says research leader Edward Ashton from Taiwan's National Academy of Sciences. The newly discovered – and accepted by the International Astronomical Union – satellites are “irregular moons”. They are probably fragments of larger celestial bodies that were destroyed in collisions.
More and more traces of a huge collision
As the research team now explains, it examined Saturn's surroundings as closely as possible with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope between 2019 and 2021 and searched for the weakest signals by combining images. Just over 60 moons and many more unclassifiable objects were discovered. For this reason, these objects were studied again in 2023, and it was confirmed that they are indeed satellites. They are all only a few kilometers in size and were formed comparatively recently. The team assumes that they have only been orbiting Saturn since a collision less than 100 million years ago.
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As Ashton goes on to explain, most of the more than 100 new moons were discovered in the so-called Mundilfari subgroup. This is named after Saturn's moon of the same name and apparently contains the remains of this collision. The discovery therefore provides a valuable insight into the history of Saturn and its irregular companions. With current technology, it is unlikely that many more moons will be discovered, says Ashton. Saturn is therefore likely to retain its leading position. We currently only know of 95 moons on Jupiter, and less than 30 and 20 on Uranus and Neptune respectively. In the inner solar system, only the planets Mars and Earth still have moons.
It has already been assumed that a medium-sized moon orbiting retrograde around Saturn was destroyed in Saturn's orbit around 100 million years ago. This date also fits in well with the increasingly probable date of formation of the distinctive rings. In 2022, a US research team explained that their simulations suggest that a moon of Saturn destroyed 160 million years ago could explain not only the rings but also some peculiarities of the entire system. Another research group followed up in 2023: Their analyses based on other data suggest that the rings were formed 100 million to a maximum of 400 million years ago.
(mho)
