For centuries, Jupiter reigned as king of the moons. Initially, the Big Four, discovered by Galileo, and then as optics and astronomy advanced, more and more, smaller and smaller bodies, until Big J could proudly boast of 95 moons in its orbital thrall. But Jupiter got cocky. Jupiter rested on its laurels. Jupiter, it turns out, was playing against plumbers and mailmen when it put up its record numbers.
Saturn, meanwhile, was hungry. Saturn ate the tape and put in the hours in the gym. In 2020, astronomers discovered 20 new Saturnian moons. In 2023, they racked up 62 more. This week, the International Astronomical Union formally recognized a whopping 128 further new satellites, giving Saturn a total of 274 moons, a record that will surely never be broken (in this solar system, which as we all know is the galaxy's top-tier league). Saturn has more moons than it knows what to do with! It has more moons than the rest of the planets combined! Jupiter can attempt to dry its tears with its pathetic 95 Jovian moons, which compared to mighty Saturn might as well be no moons at all. Jupiter? More like Venus!! When it comes to moon-having.
The latest moons were discovered by an international team led by Edward Ashton, who also headed the group that discovered the 2023 batch. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up," Ashton said, spiking the moon in the end zone as Jupiter cries to the refs for a flag.
All of the new moons are small, just a few miles across, and roughly potato-shaped, not being big enough for their own gravity to make them spherical. These moons are likely chunks of larger objects that broke apart earlier in Saturn's life—though, interestingly, not that much earlier: sometime in the last 100 million years, the researchers suspect. The moon were discovered clumped in groups, and weird elliptical orbits that indicate they weren't part of the initial protoplanetary disk formation—both good reasons to assume they were formed fairly recently. The researchers hope these new moons will help scientists understand the origin of Saturn's rings, still one of the great mysteries of the solar system; the current consensus leans toward the rings being made up of material from a massive moon, or moons, that broke apart relatively recently.
Jupiter will have to attempt to console itself with its four faint and pathetic rings, consisting of dust ejected from its moons by impact events. What a sorry excuse for a planet. Count the rings!!!
Because these new Saturnian moons are so small, discovering them was no easy feat. The researchers used a technique called shift-stacking, in which multiple photographic exposures are taken over a span of hours, then essentially stacked upon each other: this has the twofold benefit of identifying moving objects and brightening up any bodies that would be too faint to spot in a single image.
For now, the new moons are identified by a string of characters—there's very little romance in a moon called S/2023 S 39—but eventually they will receive names of Inuit, Gallic, or Norse gods, depending on which moon group they belong to. Ashton has floated the idea of opening it up to a public naming contest—something that nobody has ever done for a Jovian moon, because people don't care about losers. Get fucked, Jupiter!
All due credit to the greatest Gawker headline ever written.
