62 New Moons Discovered Orbiting Saturn!

Saturn has been long known to have the largest ring system despite it not being the largest planet, but today, that is not the only fascinating thing about Saturn anymore! The ring planet is accompanied by a total of 145 moons orbiting it… That’s 62 more moons than we thought Saturn had! And 50 more than Jupiter!! The discovery of these new moons was made possible by the team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton, who is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and includes a lot of researchers that worked along with him. They gathered up and used the Subaru telescope located in Mauna Kea, Hawaii to search for the elusive moons.

Of the 62 new moons, 20 of them are only about 3 miles in diameter, making them the smallest moons discovered around Saturn. These tiny moons were spotted orbiting in the opposite direction from Saturn's rotation, meaning they are "retrograde" moons. So how did we suddenly discover all these new moons? And why weren’t we able to detect them before? The secret is in the use of all possible mechanisms we have developed over the years, with every single planet. Not all moons can be detected through the same method because they may be too small or too faint to be seen with traditional telescopes. In the case of these newly discovered Saturnian moons, they were found using a specific observing technique that involved tracking the moons over a period of time. This allowed the team to differentiate between the moons and other background objects that could have been mistaken for moons. Also, the discovery of these new moons was aided by advances in technology, such as more powerful telescopes and imaging software that can help identify small objects against a crowded background.

Those technologies were used to find Neptune and Uranus’s moons, but never used for a planet like Saturn. One can learn from this that we never know everything about an object of study until we have tried all the techniques that we know of. So now let’s answer the obvious question, how does this method work and what is it? The method is called the shift and stack method and it is a way that scientists developed to find new objects, like moons, that are too faint to see with the naked eye. To implement it, they take multiple images of the same area of space and then overlay them on top of each other. By doing this, the faint objects become brighter and stand out more clearly against the background.

Imagine taking a bunch of pictures of your messy room. You can't see everything in one picture, so you take multiple pictures from different angles. Then, you put them all together and look closely to see if there are any small things hidden in the mess that you didn't notice before. It's kind of like that. The risk of taking a lot of pictures and stacking them is the increase of noise signal, in which a lot of actual objects can be either lost or assumed to be present, yielding to inaccurate discoveries. In consequence, scientists want to make their pictures clearer by reducing unwanted noise. By doing this, they can improve the quality of their images.

To find new objects that are invisible through the lens of a telescope, they follow these specific steps: 1. They choose a path for the camera to follow. 2. They line up the pictures taken along that path. 3. They add up all the pictures in that path. 4. They repeat steps 1-3 for another path. 5. They compare the energy levels of the two paths and keep the highest one. The "shift-stack" technique involves observing a specific point in the sky for 27 days, measuring how much energy reaches the detector every second.

So how do we know that these are real moons? Ashton and Beaudoin made an incredible discovery in 2019… They found some moons close to Saturn using some fancy deep imaging techniques. However, finding just any old object close to Saturn doesn't mean it's a moon; it could just be an asteroid that happened to be passing by. To make sure that it's really a moon, the object has to be tracked for a long time. The team worked super hard and tracked the objects for two years, finally confirming that 63 of them were indeed moons.

They announced one of the new moons back in 2021, and the rest over the last couple of weeks. Some of the moons were actually seen before, but they were only briefly glimpsed and not tracked long enough to confirm that they were really orbiting Saturn. The team did some detective work and linked these observations to their new findings. Pretty cool, right?! Edward Ashton compares tracking the moons to playing a giant game of Dot-to-Dot. With about 100 different games on the same page, it can be difficult to connect the appearances of each moon with a viable orbit. All of the newly discovered moons are considered irregular, which means they were likely captured by Saturn a long time ago. Irregular moons have larger, elliptical, and inclined orbits compared to regular moons. Thanks to these new discoveries, the number of known Saturnian irregular moons has more than doubled to 121, with 58 previously known before the search began.

When you include the 24 regular moons, Saturn now has a grand total of 145 recognized moons! This is a major milestone for the ringed planet, as it has now overtaken Jupiter for having the most known moons (95). Plus, it's the first planet to have over 100 discovered moons in total! Did you know that moons can clump together based on the tilt of their orbits? In fact, in the Saturnian system, there are 3 groups of irregular moons named after different mythologies. These groups are the Inuit group, the Gallic group, and the Norse group which is the most populated.

Recently, scientists have discovered three new moons that fall into the Inuit group. These small moons have orbits similar to larger irregulars Kiviuq and Ijiraq. And here's the interesting part- these moon groups are believed to be the result of collisions. Scientists think that the current moons in a group are remnants of one or more collisions on the originally-captured moons. The team of scientists also found something really cool. They believe that a large number of small moons on retrograde orbits is the result of a disruption of a moderately sized irregular moon that happened around 100 million years ago.

Professor Gladman explains that "as one pushes to the limit of modern telescopes, we are finding increasing evidence that a moderate-sized moon orbiting backward around Saturn was blown apart something like 100 million years ago.” Why Saturn has more moons? How come Saturn has more moons than Jupiter, if Jupiter is bigger by a percentage of 16.7%? We think it is because of its past history - Saturn's moons collided more often with each other, creating smaller moons. Some scientists even think that the rings around Saturn are just old moons!

It's scientifically hypothesized that a moon got too close to Saturn's gravity and was ripped apart, scattering ice fragments and creating the picturesque rings we see today. This might mean that Saturn was actually ringless for most of its 4.5-billion-year existence! The scientists have even given the lost moon a cool name: Chrysalis. Back to our current moons, it is known that both planets have really strong gravitational fields, which means they could attract comets and other celestial objects from the Oort Cloud, resulting in more moons and moonlets. One reason why Saturn might have more moons than Jupiter is because of the orbit of its biggest moons. These moons have slightly more favorable gravitational fields than Jupiter's moons. And because Saturn's rings are much more powerful than Jupiter's, they can attract smaller moons, too. It's fascinating to think about

Callisto is the farthest moon of Jupiter, and orbits the planet at a distance of 1.8 million km. Iapetus is the farthest moon of Saturn, and orbits the planet at a distance of 3.5 million km. That’s almost the double in distance! So, there you have it! Saturn is now officially the king of moons, with a record-breaking total of 145 moons! And it's all thanks to the dedicated team of astronomers who used the shift and stack method to detect these elusive objects. The discovery of these new moons not only adds to our knowledge of the Solar System's formation, but it also opens up new opportunities for research and exploration. And who knows what else we'll discover if we keep searching for answers using innovative techniques like this? The possibilities are endless, and this discovery just goes to show that we should never stop exploring and learning about the universe around us.