“Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system,” reports The Guardian. Saturn thus has at least “274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets in the solar system combined.”
“The moons were identified using the ‘shift and stack’ technique, in which astronomers acquire sequential images that trace the moon’s path across the sky and combine them to make the moon bright enough to detect. All of the 128 new moons are ‘irregular moons’, potato-shaped objects that are just a few kilometers across. The escalating number of these objects highlights potential future disagreements over what actually counts as a moon.”
Jupiter has the second most moons, with 95 confirmed moons. Until 2023, it was believed that Jupiter had more moons than Saturn, but that apparently isn’t the case.
“Closer observations of the bonanza of tiny moons” recently discovered on Saturn “could give scientists a window into a turbulent period in the early solar system, in which the planets migrated around in unstable orbits and collisions were common. The new moons are clumped together in groups, suggesting that many of them are the remnants of much larger objects that collided and shattered within the last 100m years. The moons all have large, elliptical orbits at an angle to those of moons closer to the planet.”
A British spacecraft recently captured up-close images of Mercury.
Last year, an Indian mission to the sun gathered information about the sun’s outer layers, using an array of instruments to measure and collect images of those layers. And a Chinese space probe to the far side of the moon returned to Earth with rare moon rocks.
A NASA spacecraft recently made the closest-ever approach to the sun to gather images of the sun’s outer layers.
