They're tiny, and they're irregular, but they're still moons and their discovery puts Saturn back in the lead over Jupiter for most moons.
An international team of scientists found the moons. Edward Ashton, a post-doc at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, led the research. They’ll publish their results in a couple of months. The work features a new method of searching for moons that’s been used for Neptune and Uranus but, up until now, not for Saturn.
“Tracking these moons makes me recall playing the kid’s game Dot-to-Dot because we have to connect the various appearances of these moons in our data with a viable orbit,” explains Edward Ashton, “but with about 100 different games on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle.”to find the moons. It senses smaller, fainter moons by shifting a set of sequential images at the rate that the moon is moving across the sky.
The International Astronomical Union is careful about recognizing new moons. A single observation doesn’t meet the threshold, as that could simply indicate an asteroid passing by. Instead, an object has to be tracked over time before the IAU will recognize it as a moon. Some of the new moons were observed in the past, but not enough to be confirmed.. Their orbits are irregular, meaning they’re distant and inclined and often eccentric or retrograde.
This image shows the paths of four of the new moons as they orbit Saturn during the period 2019-2021. The coloured dots mark the observed position for each moon; the dashed curve shows the orbit that connects them. Image Credit: Moons tend to find themselves in coordinated orbital groups based on orbital tilt. Saturn has three of these groups of moons: The
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