An international team of astronomers has found 62 new moons around Saturn using an innovative technique. These irregular moons contribute to Saturn's total moon count of 145, surpassing Jupiter, and provide insights into the planet's moon system's collisional history. The work of an international
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured exquisite details of the ring system in this 2019 observation. An international team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton has just discovered 62 new moons around Saturn using a technique called ‘shift and stack,’ which enhances the faint signals of smaller moons. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon , M.H. Wong and the OPAL Teamusing an innovative technique.
The paths of four of the new moons as they orbit Saturn during the period 2019-2021. The colored dots mark the observed position for each moon; the dashed curve shows the orbit that connects them. Credit: University of British Columbia “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,” explains Edward Ashton, “but with about 100 different games on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle.”
The irregular moons tend to clump together into orbital groups based on the tilt of their orbits. In the Saturnian system, there are 3 such groups whose names are drawn from different mythologies: there is the Inuit group, the Gallic group, and the much more populated Norse group. For example, three new discoveries fall in the Inuit group: S/2019 S 1, S/2020 S 1 and S/2005 S 4 have very small orbits tilted similarly to that of the previously known larger irregulars Kiviuq and Ijiraq.
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