nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqzsmqwsekvkxtykld4hty6wf37608m60vt2lxrt0kktgrqsk5m6ysjgl0c2 (nprofile…l0c2) - that's a great question, and I don't know the answer, but none of the new moons were found in the rings.
"All the moons are irregular, meaning they are small, orbit at a highly angled slope relative to Saturn’s equator, and often travel around the planet backward relative to the other major moons. Not much else can be gleaned about them because they are just faint dots of light in telescopic views. But they extend from about 6.5 million to nearly 18 million miles from the planet. For comparison, the planet’s rings extend to just 175,000 miles, and its major moons — including Titan and Enceladus — are up to two million miles away.
The existence of so many moons around Saturn hints at multiple dramatic collisions in space. Dr. Ashton and his team believe that the irregular moons were captured by Saturn at some point in its history. Some may be fragments of large objects that collided elsewhere in the solar system, while others may be further fragments of collisions between moons up to tens of miles in size that crashed together in Saturn’s orbit.
The team has grouped many of the moons, identifying potential families that may have come from the same collisions. “You’re trying to conclude what the great-great-grandparents were like, five generations later,” said Brett Gladman, an author of the paper at the University of British Columbia.
A particularly interesting subgroup is named Mundilfari, after a deity of Norse mythology, and includes 47 of the 128 new moons. The team thinks this subgroup might be the result of a collision within Saturn’s orbit as recent as 100 million years ago, which was not so long ago on cosmic time scales."
Paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/science/saturn-new-moons.html
John Carlos Baez /
npub17u…8pd6m
2025-03-12 01:44:54
in reply to nevent1q…vx58
Author Public Key
npub17u6xav5rjq4d48fpcyy6j05rz2xelp7clnl8ptvpnval9tvmectqp8pd6mPublished at
2025-03-12 01:44:54Event JSON
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