Jupiter’s name as the planet with the most moons came a few months ago. But Jupiter did not hold that title for long. Because, meanwhile, 62 new moons have been discovered on Saturn. As a result, Saturn was able to regain the moon’s crown. The planet now has a large list of 145 natural satellites. That is why this planet has become the ‘King of the Moon’ with an extensive list of 145 natural satellites, rivaling Jupiter’s 92.
An international team of researchers has compiled a huge list of 62 new moons that were hidden in the past. They used the shift-and-stack technique to search combs around Saturn to detect these previously invisible objects. This method has also been used in the past to study the moons around Neptune and Uranus.
By changing a series of images at the same rate as the moon moves across the sky, combining all the data actually boosts the moon’s signal, say researchers at the University of British Columbia. That’s why the moons look a little dim. Therefore, the images are visibly stacked in separate images.
“Observing these moons reminds me of a child’s game of dot-to-dot,” said Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. Because the data must correlate the various appearances of these moons with the correct orbits. But it is very difficult to combine almost 100 different games in one page. Because you don’t know which points make up which puzzle.”
The search resumed in 2019 and the star was actually the moon, not another asteroid, and was tracked over the next several years. New moons are in the category of irregular moons. Because they are thought to be captured by Saturn and are characterized by larger, more elliptical orbits than typical moons. The number of known irregular moons of Saturn has doubled to 121. 58 of them were identified before the search operation began.
However, Saturn never regained its crown for having the only known moon. Instead, it is the first planet to have more than 100 moons.
