Saturn reclaims its title of ‘moon king’ with the discovery of 62 new moons orbiting the planet, bringing the total to 145

Saturn has once again been crowned “King of the Moons” after scientists discovered 62 new moons around the gas planet, bringing the total to 145 and 95 moons detected so far. surpassed record holder Jupiter. 

An international team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, has discovered 62 new moons of Saturn.

Over the past 20 years, repeated satellite probes around Saturn have increased its sensitivity.

In the latest study, the team used a technique called “shift and stack” to find smaller, darker Saturn moons.

Shift and Stack have been used before to search for Neptune and Uranus, but never for Saturn.

Using this technique, the researchers cycled through a series of sequential images at the speed of the moon moving across the sky. This amplified the moon’s signal when all the data were combined. The “stacked” images allowed us to see the moon so faint that we couldn’t see it in the individual frames.

The initial discovery hunt was conducted in 2019, but to confirm that the objects are in fact satellites orbiting the planet, it’s not simply the act of a randomly passing asteroid. must be tracked for several years to eliminate

After carefully collating objects found on different nights over two years, the researchers managed to track 63 new moons, one of which will be announced in 2021. 

The other 62 new moons that have now been announced and are all classed as “irregular moons”, which are characterised by their large, elliptical and inclined orbits, compared to regular moons.

“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,” Dr Ashton said, “but, with about 100 different games on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle.”

Saturn is now the first planet to have more than 100 discovered moons.