As if its magnificent rings were not enough to set it apart, Saturn ruled as the planet with the most moons for many years, boasting 83 natural satellites of its own. However, sometime in early 2023, Jupiter swooped in to steal Saturn's crown when astronomers found that the largest planet of our solar system had 95 moons.
And while Jupiter's victory was exciting, it seems it is also very brief.
Recently, an international team of astronomers led by the University of British Columbia has discovered 62 new moons orbiting Saturn, taking the total number to 145! This find has put the planet back in first place in the Solar System's 'moon race' after being briefly overtaken by gas giant Jupiter.
Further, by overtaking Jupiter (with its 95 recognised moons), Saturn has also become the first planet to have over 100 discovered moons, said the researchers.
"Saturn not only has nearly doubled its number of moons, it now has more moons than all the rest of the planets in the solar system combined," said Prof Brett Gladman, an astronomer at the UBC, the Guardian reported.
The new moons, which have been assigned strings of numbers and letters for now, will eventually be named after Gallic, Norse, and Canadian Inuit gods, in keeping with the convention for Saturn's moons.
All of the newly discovered moons are in the class of irregular moons, thought to be initially captured by their host planet long ago. Irregular moons are characterised by their large, elliptical, and inclined orbits compared to regular moons.
The number of known Saturnian irregular moons has more than doubled to 121, with 58 previously known before the search began. Including the 24 regular moons, there is now a total of 145 recognised by the International Astronomical Union — a group of more than 12,000 scientists responsible for designating celestial bodies, among other things.
Moreover, these irregular moons tend to clump together into orbital groups based on the tilt of their orbits. And researchers had to shift and stack many sequential images taken during three-hour spans, to detect the moons orbiting Saturn down to about 2.5 kilometres in diameter.
The original discovery search was done in 2019, uncovering the moons in a meticulous search of the deep CFHT imaging acquired that year.
To be absolutely sure, objects must be tracked for several years before they can be designated as indeed orbiting the planet. After painstakingly matching objects detected on different nights over two years, the team managed to track 62 objects, confirming them as new moons.
Meanwhile, there's been another exciting discovery regarding Saturn: we might've acquired the strongest evidence yet that Saturn's rings are remarkably young! This new study pegs the age of Saturn's rings at no more than 400 million years old — making the rings much younger than Saturn itself, which is about 4.5 billion years old.
(With inputs from IANS)
**
For weather, science, space, and COVID-19 updates on the go, download The Weather Channel App (on Android and iOS store). It's free!
