Ashton is part of a research team that has, over several years, carefully examined detailed space images taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) on the mountain top Mauna Kea in the Pacific Ocean. The newly discovered moons are not only numerous, they also provide new insights.
"They say something about the development of Saturn's irregular collection of natural satellites," explains Ashton according to the website Live Science.
The term irregular refers to the fact that the moons are angular rather than round. This is believed to indicate that they are actually fragments of larger moons that were smashed to pieces in space collisions millions of years ago. But their orbits are also unusual – they spin in the opposite direction compared to the host planet, and in ellipses outside the famous rings.
The mappings have in recent years developed into a kind of competition between our solar system's two giants, Jupiter and Saturn, about which one has the most moons. But Jupiter, with its 95, now seems to be definitively outdone.
"Based on our forecasts, I do not think Jupiter will ever catch up," says Ashton. "With current technology, I do not think we can do much more than we have so far regarding the moons around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune."
The findings have been published in the journal Arxiv and approved by the industry organization IAU (International Astronomical Union). However, they have not yet been peer-reviewed according to the "peer review" system.
