Saturn’s Moon Bonanza

Saturn’s family just grew by 128. An international team using the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope confirmed these new satellites on March 11 via the Minor Planet Center. Between 2019 and 2021, astronomers repeatedly imaged Saturn’s environs, stacking exposures to tease out faint, fast-moving points of light. Their first pass netted 64 new moons, as detailed in a paper submitted to the Planetary Science Journal. A targeted three-month survey in 2023 uncovered 128 more.

Unlike Earth's Moon, which likely formed from a gigantic impact with a planet-sized object billions of years ago, these newly discovered moons around Saturn are more likely captured objects, than moons that formed in-situ.

All are irregular moons—small (a few kilometers across), on wide, inclined, often retrograde orbits—suggesting they’re fragments of captured bodies shattered by collisions. Moreover, the steep size distribution near 3–4 km, and clustering around the Mundilfari subgroup of Saturn's moons, points to a major collision within the last 100 million years.

Saturn now boasts 274 moons—more than Jupiter’s 95 and nearly twice the total of all moons orbiting other planets in the Solar System. While each new moon currently bears a provisional alphanumeric code, they will eventually receive names drawn from Norse, Gallic, or Inuit mythology.

These discoveries enrich our understanding of Saturn’s dynamic system, where rings and moons interplay: shepherd moons sculpt ring edges, gap-making satellites carve divisions, and ancient collisions both formed and shredded satellites, feeding ring material.

With current telescope capabilities, the team believes Saturn’s known moons are now largely cataloged. Yet as technology advances, the line between moonlets and true moons may blur, hinting at even more secrets circling the ringed giant.