Astronomers say they have discovered more than 100 new satellites around Saturn, and perhaps as a result of the cosmic senses that left the debris in the orbit of the planet 100 million years ago.
The giant gas planets in our solar system have many satellites, which are defined as objects around the planets or other bodies that are not stars. Jupiter has 95 well -known satellites, Uranus 28, Neptune 16 and 128 at the last distance around Saturn, totaling 274.
“It is the largest batch of new satellites,” said Mike Alexandersen at the Harvard Smithson Center for Astronomical Physics, an author of a paper that announces the discovery that will be published in the coming days in the research observations of the American Astronomical Society.
Many of these satellites are only a few miles away – small compared to our moon, which is 259 miles. But as long as they have tracked orbits around their parents, scientists who classify things in the solar system consider them moons. This is the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union, which He shouted at 128 new satellites From Saturn on Tuesday.
The main author of the upcoming paper, Edward Ashton from the Institute of Academic circles for astronomy and astronomical physics in Taiwan, will have the rights to be naming for things.
“Whoever discovers them is entitled to naming them,” said Dr. Alexandersen, who works with the International Astronomical Union to confirm the presence of things in the solar system. The current satellite designation scheme depends on Saturn on Scandinavian characters and other myths.
“Maybe at some point they will have to expand the designation plan,” said Dr. Alexandersen.
The satellites were discovered in 2023 using the Canadian Huawei Telescope in Mona Kia in Hawaii. Dr. Ashton and his colleagues noticed spots of space near Saturn, and over time they were allowed to track the movement of unknown satellites.
“You should be able to prove that the goal of orbit is around the planet,” said Dr. Ashton, who was also responsible for finding 62 new satellites from Saturn two years ago.
All satellites are irregular, which means that they are small, orbit in a high -angle slope relative to the Saturn equator, often traveling around the planet back for other major satellites. Nothing can be obtained from them because they are just dims from light in telescope views. But it extends from about 6.5 million to about 18 million miles from the planet. For comparison, the planet’s rings extend to only 175,000 miles, and its main moons – including Titan and Encladus – are up to two million miles.
The presence of many satellites around Saturn in multiple dramatic collisions in space. Dr. Ashton and his team believed that irregular moons were arrested by Saturn at some point in its history. Some parts of the big things that collided elsewhere in the solar system may be, while others may be other fragments of collision between moons of up to dozens of miles that were shattered together in the orbit of Saturn.
The team collected many satellites, identifying the potential families that may be of the same collision. “You are trying to conclude how great ancestors were, after five generations,” said Brett Gladman, author of the newspaper at the University of Colombia.
A special interesting sub -group is called Mondlepari, after the god of Scandinavian myths, and includes 47 out of 128 new satellites. The team believes that this sub -group may be the result of a collision in the orbit of Saturn recently in 100 million years, which has not long passed on cosmic time standards.
The age of the group can be window on a chaotic activity in the external solar system, which is usually supposed to be quieter in the past percent.
“This is implicitly that we may have been facing collision events, and we see shrapnel in a number of small satellites,” said Michelle Banyster, an astronomer at the University of Cantirier, New Zealand, who did not participate in the paper.
Heidi Hamil, an astronomer at the Association of Universities in Astronomy, said that knowing more about these satellites is difficult to look at their small size, but astronomers may be able to study them with the James Web telescope.
Dr. Ashton said that there are more satellites about Saturn waiting to be discovered, perhaps in thousands.
But he may leave those discoveries to others.
He said, “I have come out a little now.”