In a race of the number of moons Jupiter is always won the race and Saturn will always remain second. But new discoveries about the planet change the course completely, 60 moons have been found orbiting the most beautiful planet.
Jupiter as per the record has 92 moons, these new moons are small in size and it requires a painstaking method to detect them. These new moons will help you identify the past of Saturn’s planet.
Astronomers Detect These Moons Through Shifting and Stacking of Images
Astronomer Edward Ashton of the Academia Sinica Institute of Ashton of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan find Saturn’s 60 new moons with a diameter of just 2.5 kilometers (1.55 miles).
These were very small in size compared to the other Saturn moon. Now Saturn has a total of 145 moons. As we all know it outshines other objects around it interestingly enough the criteria for defining a moon.
Detecting the moons is not an easy task it requires observation of its orbital paths analyze carefully to determine if its stable. Because looking at the objects near the planets and saying that it is the moon is not sufficient for observation.
Scientists used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to detect unknown objects in space around Saturn. They have used shifting and staking techniques to detect the planet’s moons.
The set of sequential images is shifted at the same rate a moon moves across the sky. Then these images are stacked, a technique that amplifies signals too faint to be seen in an individual image and makes them brighter so that scientists can see them.
Between then and 2021 they periodically took the observations for three hours spans, shifting and stacking the resulting images to see if the objects they identified could be moons. They picked out 63 new moons, one of which was announced in 2021. Now they have painstakingly confirmed the other 62.
Ashton says “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 but with about 100 different games.on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle.”
The Newly Discover Moons Belong to the Three Groups of Saturn’s Moon
All the new 62 discover Saturn’s moons are classified into three groups – Inuit, Gallic, and Norse moons- they orbit the planet on large elliptical orbits.
These new moons fall into the Norse Group, which is the most populous and has the greatest orbital distance from Saturn. The moon in this category rotates in the opposite direction to Saturn’s rotation.
This discovery of the moon helps scientists to study Saturn’s past. Astronomers interpreted that Saturn’s moon could be collide in the past which left swarms of smaller moons. These newly discovered moons are the result of that old incident.
Astronomers Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia said “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.”