Saturn’s 62 New Moons Discovered

Saturn, the second largest planet in the Solar System, recently lost the title of the planet with the most moons in the Solar System. The title had passed to Jupiter with 12 new moons discovered in the past months. But the table has changed again.

Jupiter, which was the leader in the number of satellites with a total of 92 satellites, lost the leadership to Saturn again. Scientists from the University of British Columbia announced the discovery of 62 new satellites orbiting Saturn.

How were new moons discovered?

• The course of four of the newly discovered moons around Saturn.

The new moons were discovered by the team led by Edward Ashton using a technique not previously used on Saturn. Scientists chose a path to be observed with the “shift and stack” technique, and aligned all the photographs obtained during the observation on this path.

With this alignment technique, which was applied on many paths, new objects that had not been rotated around the planet before, namely satellites, emerged. This technique has also been used to probe the moons of Neptune and Uranus until now.

The images used in the technique were the images taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope between 2019-2021. As a result of the images covering the three-hour time period and aligned on the road, objects as small as 2.5 kilometers in diameter were also observed.

Saturn’s total number of satellites has reached 145, with 62 new moons.