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Saturn returns to sit on top of the largest planet in the solar system In the race for the throne of the planets with the most moons, a number of leading planets alternate with each new discovery of faint moons that were not visible to us before. With every development of telescopes and methods of detecting space objects, the outcome of this race changes. A few months after it was discovered that Jupiter had 92 moons, Saturn is now advancing to take the lead with 145 moons. The new discovery – which is the result of the work of an international team of researchers – included 63 new moons, which makes Saturn occupy the first place as the planet with the most moons, and also as the first planet to exceed the number of its 100 moons, according to <a href="https://phas.ubc.ca/saturn-re-takes-moon-crown">the press release</a> published by the University of British Columbia. of British Colombia) on its website on May 10. The statement states that over the past two decades, the circumference of Saturn has been examined repeatedly in search of moons in various ways that are becoming more accurate over time. In this latest study, a research team led by Dr. – A technique known as "image-stacking and swapping" in order to find the smaller, fainter moons of Saturn, a method that has been used before in searches of moons around Neptune and Uranus. Kiviuk Moon is a large irregular moon of Saturn that was known by (Go Astronomy) Image Stacking Technique Changing a set of successive images at the rate the moon is moving across the sky causes the moon's signal to become clearer as the data is collected, allowing very faint moons (which cannot be seen in single images) to become visible in the "stacked" images. The team used data taken between 2019 and 2019. And 2021 using the CFHT telescope installed on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. By stacking many sequential images taken over 3-hour time periods, they were able to discover Saturn's small moons, which are about 2.5 kilometers in diameter. Although the discovery of Ashton and his colleagues took place in 2019, simply finding an object close to Saturn is not enough to assert that it is a moon, as it could be an asteroid that happened to pass near Saturn, as this is unlikely but possible in principle, and to confirm the identity of The space object had to be tracked for several years before it could be proven to be orbiting the planet with certainty. After painstaking matching of objects discovered on different nights over a period of two years, the team was able to track 63 objects and confirm that they are new moons. . Edward Ashton says: Tracking these moons makes me remember the children's game Connect the Dots, because we have to relate the different shapes of these moons in our data to a realistic orbit, but with about 100 different shapes on the same page, we can't know which dots follow which shape. The trajectories of four of the new moons during their orbit around Saturn during the period 2019-2021 (University of British Columbia) Irregular moons All new moons fall into the category of irregular moons, which are initially believed to have been picked up by their host planet long ago, which are characterized by their large, elliptical orbits that are inclined compared to regular moons, and the number of known irregular moons of Saturn has doubled to 121, of which 58 were known. Before, including the 24 regular moons, a total of 145 moons have been identified. Irregular moons tend to group together in orbital groups based on the inclination of their orbits, and in the case of Saturn there are 3 such groups: the Inuit group, the Gallic group, and the more populous Norse group. And there are 3 new discoveries in the Inuit group, which are: “S/2019 S 1”, “S/2020 S 1” and “S/2005 S 4”, with very small orbits inclined similar to the orbits of Kiviuk and Igraq, which are larger, irregular moons that were previously known. . remnants of lunar collisions All new moons fall into one of the three known groups, with the Scandinavian group again being the most populous of new moons, and these groups are believed to have been formed as a result of collisions, meaning that the current group of moons is the remnants of one or more collisions with previous regular moons, and then the A better understanding of the orbital distribution provides insight into the collision history of Saturn's system of irregular moons. All new moons fall into the category of irregular satellites captured by their long-time host planet (NASA). Based on previous studies of these moons, the team suggested that the large number of small moons in orbits opposite to the direction of motion of the other moons is the result of a relatively recent perturbation, over the past 100 million years, of an irregular medium-sized moon shattering into fragments that are now cataloged in the Norse group. Professor Brett Gladman of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia explains, "With the increasing capabilities of modern telescopes, we find increasing evidence that a medium-sized moon that was orbiting Saturn in reverse was destroyed 100 million years ago."
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