Saturn has been recrowned "moon king" after scientists discovered 62 new moons in the gas planet's surroundings, bringing the total to 145, overtaking previous record holder Jupiter, which has 95 recognised moons.
A team of international astronomers — led by Edward Ashton from Taiwan's Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics — has discovered 62 new moons of Saturn.
Over the past 20 years, Saturn's surroundings have repeatedly been examined for moons with increasing sensitivity.
In the latest study, the team used a technique called "shift and stack", in order to find smaller and fainter Saturnian moons.
"Shift and stack" had been used before, to search around Neptune and Uranus, but never for Saturn.
With this technique, researchers shifted through a set of sequential images at the rate that the moon was moving across the sky.
This resulted in enhancement of the moon's signal when all the data was combined, the "stacked" image allowed them to see moons that were too faint to be seen in individual images.
The original discovery search was made in 2019 but — in order to make sure that the objects are in fact moons orbiting the planet — it must be tracked for several years to rule out it was not just an asteroid that happened to be passing by.
After carefully matching objects detected on different nights over the course of two years, the team managed to track 63 new moons, one of which was announced in 2021.
The other 62 new moons that have now been announced and are all classed as "irregular moons", which are characterised by their large, elliptical and inclined orbits, compared to regular moons.
"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," Dr Ashton said, "but, with about 100 different games on the same page and you don't know which dot belongs to which puzzle."
Saturn is now the first planet to have more than 100 discovered moons.
