Jupiter may be the largest planet in the solar system, but Saturn has a bigger entourage!

Astronomers have discovered 20 more moons around Saturn, bringing its total number to 82— the most for any planet in the solar system! But Jupiter isn’t too far behind with its 79 known natural satellites after astronomers announced last year that they found 12 new moons orbiting it.

Saturn’s new-found moons are all about three miles wide. They are so faint that they lie just about at the detection limit for the Subaru telescope, a facility atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano used in their detection.

That taken together, these sets of relatively small moons could help astronomers better understand the many collisions that took place in the early solar system, and they could provide ripe new flyby targets for future missions to the gas giants.

Currently, three missions to Jupiter and Saturn are in the works: NASA’s Europa Clipper; NASA’s Dragonfly mission; and the European Space Agency’s JUICE mission.

Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution for Science who co-discovered both planets’ newest moons, and his colleagues think that each of these moon clusters formed from a distinct parent body that Saturn captured during the solar system’s early days. Then, in a celestial game of bumper cars, collisions broke up the parent bodies over time, yielding the fragmented moons we now see.

None of the 20 new moons yet have official names. The is public to give suggestions in a contest set to end on December 6.

Source: www.nationalgeographic.com

Published in Dawn, Young World, October 12th, 2019