You never think as a kid that you’re going to have to learn about the planets more than once. We got told there were nine of them and we left it at that, comfortable in the knowledge that we knew everything that there is to know about the solar system and that that would not change. Imagine the hubris. Like ancient Egyptians confident that the periodic inundation of the Nile River was caused by the divine will of the Pharaohs (and not by, say, monsoons in the Ethiopian Highlands), we never anticipated that this knowledge could come into doubt.
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We were fools. Pluto is not a planet, but a hypothetical ‘Planet Nine’ might be (although we’ve never seen it, if it does exist). Jupiter has the most moons of any planet in the solar system — or so we thought. In the words of clearly very enthusiastic astronomer Scott S Sheppard, it is, in fact, Saturn who is the “true moon King“.
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center announced Monday that a team headed up by Sheppard had discovered 20 hitherto undiscovered moons orbiting our solar system’s most accessorised gas giant, bringing it to a total of 82. Jupiter, which previously held the title of ‘moon king’ (?), has only 79. Disgusting!
The moons were discovered orbiting Saturn using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which is the same telescope with which another team led by Sheppard discovered 12 new moons in orbit around Jupiter. “Using some of the largest telescopes in the world, we are now completing the inventory of small moons around the giant planets,” says Sheppard. “They play a crucial role in helping us determine how our Solar System’s planets formed and evolved.”
Most of the moons are pretty tiny, sitting around only 5km in diameter, compared to the 3,474km diameter of our comparatively very thicc moon.
Carnegie is running a competition to name Saturn’s lovely new moons, although you have to stick within the theme of “giants from Norse, Gallic or Inuit mythology”, so Moony McMoonface is probably out of the question.
