#irregular moons

[zespaceblog]

Moony McMoon Face

Quite honestly, I use any excuse to slap a picture of Saturn on my blog, but in this case it's well deserved. All that browsing through Tumblr and then the most beautiful planet Saturn to feast your eyes upon.

There is actually a reason this time, as Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute has been hard at work leading a team of astronomers looking for moons of Saturn, and they didn't just find 1 new one, they found 62 new moons !

That takes Saturn's current total to 145, beating the mighty Jupiter into second place with a mere 95.

Of course, these moons are not the classic beautiful spherical moons of Cassini wonder and fame, they are more the asteroid potato like moons that Mars has, and the reason they've not been found before now, is simply they do not orbit in a nice simple predictable way, they are classified as irregular.

The team are not convinced they've done finding moons either. What draws them to this task is unpicking the history and past of the gas giant systems, as it is believed many of these moons are parts of larger objects that have been crushed or smashed up at some point in the past, so it's evidence of a dynamic system, one in a state of change.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

𝗠𝗢𝗢𝗡 𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: 𝗦𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗡 𝗡𝗢𝗪 𝗛𝗔𝗦 𝟮𝟳𝟰 𝗞𝗡𝗢𝗪𝗡 𝗠𝗢𝗢𝗡𝗦! 🌕

It's time to update the science books.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has confirmed the discovery of 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, catapulting its total to a staggering 274 — more than all the other planets combined.

In recent years, Jupiter and Saturn seem to be competing who will be the "moon king" as astronomers detect more moons orbiting the said gas giants.

But this March 2025, Saturn had a landslide victory with 274 moons, leaving Jupiter at far second place with 95.

The groundbreaking discovery was made by astronomers from the University of British Columbia and was officially recognized by the IAU this month.

Unlike regular moons, these new additions are irregular moons — small, lumpy fragments from ancient collisions, orbiting at steep angles, sometimes against Saturn’s rotation.

This finding reveals the planet’s chaotic, violent history, where larger icy bodies were shattered into smaller moons. Scientists now face the challenge of naming them all, following Gallic, Inuit, and Norse mythology conventions.

With advancing space technology and observation methods, the chances of discovering more moons — and even new dwarf planets — in our solar system are higher than ever.

The coming years promise to be filled with exciting cosmic surprises and groundbreaking revelations.

[spaceplasma]

Jupiter's Irregular Satellites

The planet Jupiter has 67 confirmed moons. This gives it the largest retinue of moons with "reasonably secure" orbits of any planet in the Solar System. In fact, Jupiter and its moons are like a miniature solar system with the inner moons orbiting faster than the others. Eight of Jupiter's moons are regular satellites, with prograde and nearly circular orbits that are not greatly inclined with respect to Jupiter's equatorial plane. The remainder of Jupiter's moons are irregular satellites, whose prograde and retrograde orbits are much farther from Jupiter and have high inclinations and eccentricities. These moons were probably captured by Jupiter from solar orbits. There are 17 recently discovered irregular satellites that have not yet been named.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Lowell Observatory/J. Spencer/JHU-APL