Saturn’s Moon Count Reaches 274 After 128 New Discoveries

March 16, 2025
3 mins read
Representative Image. Photo Source:Spokes Spotted In Saturn's Rings(CC BY 4.0)
Representative Image. Photo Source:Spokes Spotted In Saturn's Rings(CC BY 4.0)

Saturn has officially secured its title as the “moon king” of our solar system with the discovery of 128 new moons, bringing its total to an impressive 274. This finding, confirmed by the International Astronomical Union on March 11, 2025, puts Saturn far ahead of Jupiter, which has 95 moons.

The Hunt for New Moons

A team of astronomers from Taiwan, Canada, USA, and France made this remarkable discovery using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Their observations spanned from 2019 to 2023, employing a technique called “shift and stack” that combines multiple images to detect faint objects orbiting Saturn.

Rose Diagram of the irregular moons of Saturn. Photo Source: The University Of British Columbia

“With the knowledge that these were probably moons, and that there were likely even more waiting to be discovered, we revisited the same sky fields for three consecutive months in 2023,” said lead researcher Dr. Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica who completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia. “Sure enough, we found 128 new moons. Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.”

Small But Significant

These newly discovered moons are quite different from Earth’s Moon. They’re classified as “irregular moons” – small, potato-shaped objects only a few kilometers across with erratic orbits.

“These moons are a few kilometers in size and are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets,” explained Dr. Brett Gladman, professor in the University of British Columbia’s department of Physics and Astronomy.

The moons orbit at distances between 6.5 million and 18 million miles from Saturn – much farther out than both Saturn’s famous rings (which extend to just 175,000 miles) and its major moons like Titan and Enceladus (which orbit up to two million miles away).


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Clues to Saturn’s Past

What makes this discovery particularly interesting to scientists is what it reveals about Saturn’s history. Many of the new moons are clustered in groups, suggesting they’re fragments from cosmic collisions.

Of particular interest is the Mundilfari subgroup, which includes 47 of the 128 new moons. Researchers believe this cluster may have formed from a significant collision within Saturn’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago – relatively recent in astronomical terms.

“These studies reveal that the giant planets captured some moderate-sized moons more than 4 billion years ago as the giant planets formed, and we are now seeing moons which are mostly the fragments of those originally-captured moons,” said Dr. Gladman.

Dr. Michele Bannister, an astronomer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who wasn’t involved in the research, noted, “This is implying we could be having collisional events, and we’re seeing the shrapnel in the population of tiny moons.”

The End of a Moon Race?

Saturn and Jupiter have been locked in what astronomers call a “moon race” for years, with Saturn only taking the lead two years ago when the same research team discovered 64 additional moons.

“We don’t think that Jupiter will ever be able to reclaim that title,” said Gladman. With this latest discovery, Saturn now has nearly triple Jupiter’s moon count and more moons than all other planets in our solar system combined.

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As for finding even more moons around Saturn, Dr. Ashton believes we may have reached the limits of current technology. “With current technology I don’t think we can do much better than what has already been done for moons around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune,” he said.

Though there may be thousands more tiny moons yet to be discovered, Ashton admits he’s ready for a break: “I’m a bit mooned out at the moment.”

FAQ:

Why does Saturn have so many more moons than other planets? Saturn has 274 moons largely because many are fragments of larger moons that were captured by the planet billions of years ago and then broken apart through collisions. Saturn’s strong gravitational pull allowed it to capture these objects, and subsequent crashes created numerous smaller moons from the original larger ones.
How big are these newly discovered moons? The 128 newly discovered moons are small, irregular objects just a few kilometers across. They’re much smaller than Earth’s Moon (which is 2,159 miles or about 3,475 kilometers across) and are described as “potato-shaped” rather than spherical.
How were these moons discovered? Astronomers used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii between 2019 and 2023. They employed a technique called “shift and stack,” which involves layering multiple images of the same area to enhance the visibility of faint objects, allowing them to track the movement of previously undetected moons.
What makes a moon a “moon” rather than just space debris? For an object to be classified as a moon, it must have a trackable orbit around a planet or another non-star body. The International Astronomical Union is responsible for officially recognizing and cataloging moons in our solar system.
What do these new moons tell us about our solar system? The discovery provides insights into the chaotic early solar system. The clustering of moons in groups like the Mundilfari subgroup suggests a significant collision within Saturn’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago, challenging assumptions that the outer solar system has been relatively calm in recent cosmic history.
Will we discover more moons around Saturn in the future? Scientists believe there could potentially be thousands more moons around Saturn, but Dr. Ashton suggests we may have reached the limits of what current technology can detect. Future discoveries might require more advanced telescopes or observational techniques.

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