2023-05-17 01:00:49
A research team including the University of British Columbia in Canada reported that they discovered 62 moons orbiting Saturn. As a result, Saturn has 145 satellites, surpassing Jupiter’s 95 to become the planet with the most satellites.
In February, the Carnegie Research Center in the U.S. reported that it had discovered 12 new satellites orbiting Jupiter, making it the planet with the most satellites in the solar system, exceeding Saturn’s record of 83 at the time. Since then, Jupiter satellites have been added, and now it has 95 satellites.
However, this research team reported that they had discovered 62 new moons on Saturn. As a result, the number of satellites of Saturn became 145, once more surpassing that of Jupiter and becoming the largest in the solar system. The research team is said to have found an undiscovered satellite by analyzing data observed by a telescope located on the top of Mauna Care Mountain in Hawaii from 2019 to 2021.
In order to identify satellites that might not be found so far because they were small or dark, the research team used a method called the shift stack method in which a number of consecutive images taken over three hours were overlapped little by little. The discovery of 62 new satellites as a result of collating objects detected on various nights over a period of more than two years. It is said that some of the satellites discovered this time included those as small as only 2.5 km in width.
The research team said that while tracking the satellites of Saturn, they thought of a dot-connecting game for children because they had to tie the various aspects of these satellites in the data to feasible orbits. All 62 newly discovered satellites are called irregular satellites, with elliptical orbits far from the planet and orbits retrograde to the planet’s rotation.
Irregular satellites of Saturn are classified into groups according to their orbital inclination, each with a name from Norse mythology, Gaul mythology, and Inuit mythology. It is said that the newly discovered satellite will also be given this mythical name.
A group of Saturnian irregular satellites with similar orbits appear to have originated from a larger moon that collapsed 100 million years ago. Related information this placecan be found in
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