![]() ![]() ![]() The team behind the new discovery thinks that the large number of tiny moons in a retrograde orbit around Saturn (that is, opposite in direction to the planet's orbit) is evidence of a collision between irregular moons around the gas giant as recently as 100 million years ago. Jupiter now has the most moons in the solar system, beating Saturn thanks to 12 newfound satellites 20 new moons found around Saturn, snagging satellite record from Jupiter Saturn: Everything you need to know about the sixth planet from the sun Investigating the orbits of Saturn's irregular moons could help astronomers better understand the history of such collisions in the gas giant system. The moons in these three groups are believed to have been created when larger moons around Saturn originally captured by the gas giant slammed together and fragmented. Three of the new moons belong to the Inuit group, but the majority fit in the Norse group. Saturn's system currently hosts three of these groupings - the Inuit group, the Gallic group and the densely populated Norse group, all of which take their names from different mythologies.Īll of the newfound moons of Saturn fall into one of these three currently existing groupings. Irregular moons like these new ones tend to bunch up in groupings depending on the tilt of their orbits. Saturn now has 121 known irregular moons along with its 24 regular moons. The newly discovered moons of Saturn are classified as "irregular moons." This term refers to objects that are believed to have been captured by a planet's gravitational influence and end up orbiting it on large, flattened or "elliptical" paths that are more inclined in comparison to the orbits of regular moons. Saturn's irregular moons may have a violent history Related: Solar system planets, order and formation: A guide "But with about 100 different games on the same page, and you don't know which dot belongs to which puzzle." "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," Ashton said in a statement. One of these satellites was revealed back in 2021, with the remaining 62 moons gradually announced over the past few weeks. Performing a painstaking process of matching objects detected on different nights over the course of 24 months, the team tracked 63 objects that they ended up confirming as moons. To change these objects from "suspected moons" to "confirmed moons" of Saturn, the astronomers had to track them for several years to ensure each is actually orbiting the gas giant. Though some of the moons had been spotted as early as 2019, it takes more than sighting an object close to a planet to confirm it is a moon and not an asteroid making a brief close passage to that planet. That's about two-thirds the length of Hollywood's Walk of Fame. ![]() It allowed the astronomers to detect moons around Saturn as small as 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) in diameter. The data used by the team was collected between 20 in three-hour spans by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on top of Maunakea in Hawaii. Moons that are too faint to be seen in single images can reveal themselves in the resultant "stacked image."Īstronomers have used this method to search for moons around the ice giants Neptune and Uranus, but this is the first time it has been applied to the solar system's second-largest planet, Saturn. The technique uses a set of images shifting at the same speed at which a moon moves through the sky to enhance the signal from that moon. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |