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NASA’s
Hubble Space Telescope captured exquisite details of the ring system in this
2019 observation. An international team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton has
just discovered 62 new moons around Saturn using a technique called ‘shift and
stack,’ which enhances the faint signals of smaller moons. Credit: NASA, ESA,
A. Simon (GSFC), M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL
Team |
An international team of astronomers has found 62 new moons around Saturn using an innovative technique. These irregular moons contribute to Saturn’s total moon count of 145, surpassing Jupiter, and provide insights into the planet’s moon system’s collisional history.
The work
of an international team of astronomers has resulted in the announcement of 62
new moons of Saturn, catapulting it back into first place of the ‘moon race’
around the giant planets of our Solar System. The team is led by Edward Ashton
(currently a postdoctoral fellow at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute of
Astronomy and Astrophysics) and includes Professor Brett Gladman (Department of
Physics & Astronomy at the University of British Columbia), Mike
Alexandersen (Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Jean-Marc Petit
(Observatoire de Besancon), and Matthew Beaudoin (University of British
Columbia).
Over the
past two decades, Saturn’s surroundings have been repeatedly examined for moons
with increasing sensitivity. In this latest study, Dr. Ashton’s team used a
technique known as ‘shift and stack’ in order to find fainter (and thus
smaller) Saturnian moons. This method has been used for moon searches around
Neptune and Uranus, but never for Saturn. Shifting a set of sequential images
at the rate that the moon is moving across the sky results in enhancement of
the moon’s signal when all the data is combined, allowing moons that were too
faint to be seen in individual images to become visible in the `stacked’ image.
The team used data taken using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on top
of Mauna Kea, Hawaii between 2019 and 2021. By shifting and stacking many
sequential images taken during 3 hour spans, they were able to detect moons of
Saturn down to about 2.5 kilometers in diameter.
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The paths
of four of the new moons as they orbit Saturn (black circle at center) during
the period 2019-2021. The colored dots mark the observed position for each
moon; the dashed curve shows the orbit that connects them. Credit: University
of British Columbia |
The
original discovery search was done in 2019 when Ashton and Beaudoin were
students at the University of British Columbia, uncovering the moons in a
meticulous search of the deep CFHT imaging acquired that year. But just finding
an object close to Saturn on the sky is insufficient to say for certain that it
is a moon; it could in principle be an asteroid that just happened to be
passing close to the planet (although this is unlikely). To be absolutely sure,
the object must be tracked for several years before one can establish that it
is certainly orbiting the planet. After painstakingly matching objects detected
on different nights over two years, the team has managed to track 63 objects,
thus confirming them as new moons. One of the new moons, designated S/2019 S 1,was announced back in 2021, with the rest being announced over the last couple
of weeks. Some of the team’s linked orbits were identified with past
observations from many years ago that briefly glimpsed some of these moons (but
were not tracked long enough to establish their orbit around Saturn).
“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,” explains Edward Ashton, “but with about 100 different games on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle.”
All of the
new moons are in the class of irregular moons, which are thought to be
initially captured by their host planet long ago. Irregular moons are
characterized by their large, elliptical, and inclined orbits compared to
regular moons. The number of known Saturnian irregular moons has more than
doubled to 121, with 58 previously known before the search began. Including the
24 regular moons, there is now a total of 145 recognized (by the InternationalAstronomical Union) moons orbiting Saturn. The new discoveries have resulted in
multiple milestones for the ringed planet. Saturn has not only regained its
crown for having the most known moons (overtaking Jupiter with 95 recognized
moons), it is also the first planet to have over 100 discovered moons in total.
The
irregular moons tend to clump together into orbital groups based on the tilt of
their orbits. In the Saturnian system, there are 3 such groups whose names are
drawn from different mythologies: there is the Inuit group, the Gallic group,
and the much more populated Norse group. For example, three new discoveries
fall in the Inuit group: S/2019 S 1, S/2020 S 1 and S/2005 S 4 have very small
orbits tilted similarly to that of the previously known larger irregulars
Kiviuq and Ijiraq. All of the new moons fall into one of the three known
groups, with the Norse group again being the most populated amongst the new
moons. The groups are thought to be the result of collisions, where the current
moons in a group are remnants of one or more collisions on the
originally-captured moons. A better understanding of the orbital distribution thus
provides insight into the collisional history of the irregular moon system of
Saturn.
Based on
their past studies of these moons, this team has suggested that the large
number of small moons on retrograde orbits is the result of a relatively recent
(in astronomical terms, being in the last 100 million years) disruption of a
moderately sized irregular moon that is now broken into the many fragments that
are being cataloged in the Norse group.
As
Professor Gladman explains, “as one pushes to the limit of modern telescopes,
we are finding increasing evidence that a moderate-sized moon orbiting backward
around Saturn was blown apart something like 100 million years ago.”