Saturn has officially reclaimed its title as the “Moon King” of the solar system after astronomers discovered 128 new moons orbiting the planet.
This brings Saturn’s total to 274 moons, leaving Jupiter—its closest rival—far behind with just 95 confirmed moons as of February 2024.
The discovery was made by a team of astronomers using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, who had already identified 62 Saturnian moons. In 2023, they took another look and confirmed the presence of even more hidden moons, which have now been officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union.
Unlike Saturn’s large and well-known moons like Titan and Enceladus, these new “irregular” moons are small, potato-shaped, and only a few kilometers across.
To find them, scientists used a special technique called “shift and stack,” where they took multiple images over time, tracking the moons’ movement across the sky and combining the images, making the moon bright enough to detect.
Interestingly, the newly discovered moons are clumped into groups, suggesting they were once part of larger moons that broke apart due to violent collisions with comets or other space objects. These fragments, now orbiting Saturn in wide and tilted paths, may have been created in the last 100 million years.
“[They] are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets,” said Prof. Brett Gladman, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia, in a statement.
