Saturn wins 128 moons, giving it more than the other combined planets

128 other moons were discovered in orbit SaturnBearing the total of the planet at 274 – more than there is around all the other planets of our combined solar system. But as the progress of telescope technology allow us to identify gradually smaller planetary objects, astronomers are confronted with a problem: how much a moon can be tiny before it is just a rock?

Edward Ashton In Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, and his colleagues found the new moons with the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, revealing dozens who have already escaped astronomers. They took hours of images of Saturn, adjusted them for the movement of the planet through the sky and stack them on each other to reveal objects which would be too dark to see.

All the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometers in diameter and were probably formed hundreds of millions, even billions of years, collisions between the biggest moons, explains Ashton.

“These are small rocks floating in space, so some people may not find this an achievement,” explains Ashton. “But I think it is important to have a catalog of all objects in the solar system.”

Despite the richness of the data collected by his team, the latter moons still appear only as “bluks bluals”, explains Ashton. There are more powerful telescopes that could potentially resolve more detailed moons, Although many have smaller fields of view, which would mean taking many more images, he said.

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

Could there be more moons there? Scientists have spent decades to scan the area around Saturn with increasingly powerful telescopes, which has borne fruit in recent years. In 2019, 20 new moons have been foundand Ashton and his colleagues had already Discovered 62 In 2023, separated from the 128 that they recently found. In the end, it is likely that new discoveries will require progress in telescope technology, explains Ashton, who thinks that there are easily thousands of orbit moons around Saturn, even by reducing smaller and rocky debris found in the rings of the planet.

Mike Alexandersen At the Minor Planet Center, which records the planetary bodies for IAU, says that there are probably many other moons in our solar system, because improvements to telescopes allow them to see smaller objects. He says that decisions will have to be made on what does and does not count like a moon.

“I know that IAU decided that, due to the number of moons likely to exist, they will not give priority to the nomance of all that is less than 1 kilometer. But it is not the same as they do not recognize it as a moon, ”explains Alexandersen. “They will probably only name him if a spacecraft will visit him.”

He suggested that the cut between what is a moon and what is only a rock particle which constitutes a part of a planetary ring will probably be between 1 kilometer and 1 meter in diameter. “In the end, it will probably not be my decision, it will be the IAU, which will constitute a cut that will be more or less controversial – just like the cup for a planet or not. And it will most likely be relatively arbitrary, ”explains Alexandersen.

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