62 new moons found as Saturn becomes 1st planet with over 100 such satellites

Saturn now boasts a whopping list of 145 natural satellites orbiting it making it the 'King of Moons' in our solar system as against 92 for Jupiter

Months after Jupiter became the planet with the most moons, Saturn has reclaimed the crown with the discovery of 62 new moons around the ringed world, India Today reported.

Saturn now boasts a whopping list of 145 natural satellites orbiting it making it the ‘King of Moons’ in our solar system as against 92 for Jupiter.

An international team of researchers has compiled a whopping list of 62 new moons that had remained hidden in the past. They used the shift and stack technique to comb Saturn’s surroundings to detect these previously unseen objects. The method has been used for moon searches around Neptune and Uranus in the past.

Researchers from The University of British Columbia said that shifting a set of sequential images at the rate that the moon is moving across the sky results in the enhancement of the moon’s signal when all the data is combined, allowing moons that were too faint to be seen in individual images to become visible when the images are stacked.

“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, but with about 100 different games on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle,” Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, who was part of the discovery said.

The discovery began way back in 2019 after which the objects were tracked for several years to ensure that they are actually moons and not asteroids that are known to be in the rings of the planet.

The new moons are in the class of irregular moons as they are thought to be captured by Saturn and are characterized 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.

Saturn has not only regained its crown for having the most known moons but it has also become the first planet to have over 100 moons.

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