Saturn just solidified its title as ‘moon king’ with an updated tally of 274 satellites orbiting the gas giant. The record-breaking statistic puts Saturn way ahead of its moon-bearing competitors, as now the ringed planet is officially orbited by almost twice as many moons as all other planets in the solar system combined.
An international team of astronomers made the recent discovery of 128 new moons around Saturn using the Canada France Hawaii telescope. Saturn regained its title as moon king last year with the discovery of 62 new moons, bringing its total to 145 moons. The planet’s main competition in the solar system, Jupiter, has just 95 confirmed moons.
The two gas giants have been locked in a battle over who has the most moons in their orbit for years, but it may be safe to say Saturn has won the contest by a landslide.
“Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up,” Edward Ashton, postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sincia, and lead researcher behind the discovery, said in a University of British Columbia statement.
The research team monitored the sky around Saturn with the Canada France Hawaii Telescope between 2019 to 2021, combining multiple telescope to improve the signals from astronomical objects. Their sky survey initially yielded 62 moons, as well as many more objects that could not be identified. The astronomers then revisited the same sky fields for three months in 2023 to confirm the identities of the remaining objects—that is, to confirm the objects were moons. This week, the International Astronomical Union recognized the team’s discovery.
The 128 newly discovered moons are considered irregular, meaning they’re tiny fragments of larger moons that likely broke apart by violent collisions with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets, according to the researchers. Most of the new moons are near the Mundilfari subgroup of Saturn’s moons—the likely site of a collision that took place within the last 100 million years within the Saturnian system, breaking up larger bodies into the recently ID’d satellites.
“Our carefully planned multi-year campaign has yielded a bonanza of new moons that tell us about the evolution of Saturn’s irregular natural satellite population,” Ashton said.
The team is done moon spotting for the foreseeable future, as existing technology has likely reached its limit when it comes to detecting new moons around distant planets such as Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. For now, Saturn will hold onto its crown as the solar system’s moon king.