Posted on 03/12/2025 11:27:12 AM PDT by Red Badger
The race between Jupiter and Saturn for the most moons in the Solar System may have just finally come screeching to a halt.
A team of scientists has found a whopping 128 previously unknown moons hanging around Saturn, in a discovery officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union. This brings the planet's total number of known moons to 274, leaving Jupiter, with its mere 95 moons, in the dust.
The first hint that there were more moons awaiting discovery came between 2019 and 2021, when 62 such objects were identified. Other small objects were also spotted at the time that couldn't yet be designated.
"With the knowledge that these were probably moons, and that there were likely even more waiting to be discovered, we revisited the same sky fields for three consecutive months in 2023," says astronomer Edward Ashton of Academia Sincia in Taiwan.
"Sure enough, we found 128 new moons. Based on our projections, I don't think Jupiter will ever catch up."
VIDEOAS AT LINK.................
These moons, to be clear, are not like Earth's Moon, nice and large and pleasingly spherical. They are tiny moonlets, all blobby and potato-shaped, just a few kilometers across – what are known as irregular moons.
The researchers believe that they originally comprised a small group of objects captured by gravity in Saturn's orbit early in the Solar System's history. A subsequent series of collisions would have smashed them to moony bits, resulting in the preponderance of small rocks the astronomers have found.
In fact, they believe a collision must have taken place as recently as 100 million years ago, which is a very short eyeblink of time for a planet. The location of the moons, too, within the Norse group of Saturn's moons, suggests that this is the place where the recent collision occurred.
The Norse group are moons that orbit in a retrograde direction, at inclined angles, and on elliptical paths, outside Saturn's rings. Like the newly discovered moons, they, too, are relatively potatoey.
Potatoes. Rings. Sounds familiar, somehow…
One haul of 64 moons has been detailed in a new paper submitted to the Planetary Science Journal. The preprint is available on arXiv.
Sounds more like an asteroid belt.
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff."
😁...............................
Saturn isn’t as lonely as I thought he was…
A somewhat cleaner definition is that a moon orbits a planet, while an asteroid is a body smaller than a planet that orbits the Sun. Of course, then you still have to differentiate between an asteroid and a comet, and then when it comes to comets, some have been known to orbit planets, at least for a while...
Is a moon that gets pulled down into its “parent” planet a meteorite?
Uranus?
You cracked the code!
I don’t know what you mean by 2^6 and 2^7.
C’mon, lighten up, Francis. It’s all in the semantics. Saturn has trillions of moons in the generic sense.
2^6 is 2 to the 6th power, or 2 multiplied by itself 6 times, equal to 64.
2^7 = 2x2x2x2x2x2x2 = 128, the number of moons discovered in the article.
Its all relative.
Thanks. It has been decades since my last math class, and anyway I think that would be shown as a superscript in a textbook...typing online requires different conventions.
I read a bit of Velikovsky a long time ago...had a great imagination but a lot of his ideas must be taken with a grain of salt. I think he claims somewhere that a comet turned into the planet Venus.
You’re welcome.
The one trick I knew to make a superscript didn’t work here. Oh, well.
You’re welcome.
The one trick I knew to make a superscript didn’t work here. Oh, well.
2^7 is 128.
It just seemed odd to me that both counts were powers of 2. Will the next find be 256?
It looks like there has been a conspiracy by Dualists that the rest of us have been blissfully unaware of.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.