Astronomers have discovered 20 new moons in orbit around Saturn. - NBCNewsMACH
The discovery images for one of the the newly found prograde moons of Saturn.are believed to have arisen after the formation of the planets billions of years ago was mostly complete. Each has a diameter of about 5 kilometers, or 3 miles. Seventeen are in so-called retrograde orbits, meaning their movement is opposite to Saturn’s rotation around its axis. Three are in prograde orbits, meaning they move in the same direction as the planet’s rotation.
Sheppard’s team discovered the moons by taking a fresh look at observations made more than a decade ago using the Subaru Telescope, an 8.2-meter telescope located atop, a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. “I went back through the old data searching by eye for very faint things our automatic program may have missed,” Sheppard said in the email, adding that it was “a very time-intensive process.
More Saturnian moons may yet be found. Sheppard said about 100 moons with a diameter of at least one mile are believed to be orbiting the planet — but it will take bigger telescopes to find these tiny bodies, whose small size and extreme distance makes them very hard to observe.
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