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Saturn gained 128 new moons in a single announcement in March 2025, raising its total to 274. At the time, that was more than all the other planets' moons put together.

Minor Planet Center, March 2025

SpaceScience

The story behind the card

The moons were found by a team led by Edward Ashton of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. An earlier search in 2019 to 2021 had already turned up dozens of moons, so the team watched the same patches of sky for three months in 2023, stacking many exposures so that faint, moving specks stood out. The Minor Planet Center, the International Astronomical Union's clearing house for Solar System discoveries, confirmed 128 of them in March 2025. All are irregular moons: small bodies a few kilometres across on distant, tilted orbits. They are probably fragments of larger moons that Saturn captured long ago and that later broke apart in collisions.

Türkçe oku
Satürn, Mart 2025'teki tek bir duyuruyla 128 yeni uydu kazandı ve uydu sayısı 274'e çıktı. Bu sayı, o tarihte öteki gezegenlerin bütün uydularının toplamından fazlaydı.
Küçük Gezegen Merkezi, Mart 2025

Uyduları, Tayvan'daki Academia Sinica'dan Edward Ashton'ın yönettiği bir ekip, Kanada-Fransa-Hawaii Teleskobu'yla buldu. Ekip 2019-2021 arasındaki bir taramada zaten onlarca uydu bulmuştu; bu kez 2023'te üç ay boyunca gökyüzünün aynı bölgelerini gözledi ve çok sayıda görüntüyü üst üste bindirerek hareket eden sönük noktaları görünür kıldı. Güneş Sistemi'ndeki keşifleri Uluslararası Astronomi Birliği adına onaylayan Küçük Gezegen Merkezi, bunlardan 128'ini Mart 2025'te doğruladı. Hepsi düzensiz uydu denen türden: birkaç kilometre çapında, gezegenden uzakta ve eğik yörüngelerde dolanan küçük cisimler. Büyük olasılıkla Satürn'ün çok eskiden yakaladığı, sonra çarpışmalarla parçalanan daha büyük uyduların kalıntılarıdır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Moons of Saturn
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