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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Nine new moons for Saturn

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Saturn is gaining on Jupiter! The Minor Planet Center issued two Minor Planet Electronic Circulars yesterday announcing the discoveries of nine more tiny moons for Saturn (MPEC 2006-M44 and MPEC 2006-M45). All were discovered by an observing team including David Jewitt, Scott Sheppard, and Jan Kleyna using the Subaru 8.2-meter telescope. I've added the count to the "How Many Moons?" and "Saturn's Moons" pages to keep them up to date. All of them seem to belong to two distant, retrograde families of Saturnian satellites. These families of tiny moons are actually too far away from Saturn for Cassini to be able to spot them with its instruments -- it's still better to use our powerful ground-based telescopes to study them.

If you're keeping score, Jupiter is stil in the lead with 63 moons, but Saturn is running a close second now with 56. Uranus has 27 known moons and Neptune has 13, but both of those planets almost certainly have a lot more than anyone has spotted yet.