An additional 128 moons were recently discovered orbiting Saturn, meaning the planet has a total of 274 moons. This is more than all other planets in our solar system combined.

Saturn’s Moons Multiply

As telescopes have become more powerful and advanced in recent years, scientists have continuously scanned the area around Saturn and uncovered new moons. For example, 20 moons were found in 2019, and 62 moons were discovered in 2023.

The new moons were discovered by Edward Ashton at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, and his colleagues with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The team took hundreds of images of Saturn, adjusted them based on the planet’s movement through the sky, and layered them on top of each other to reveal objects that would otherwise be too dim to see.

With sizes ranging between 2 and 4 kilometers (approximately 1.24 and 2.5 miles), the moons likely formed hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. According to Ashton, these smaller moons may have been created by collisions between larger moons.

“These are small little rocks floating in space, so some people might not find it quite an achievement,” says Ashton. “But I think it’s important to have a catalog of all the objects in the solar system.”

Though the team has only gathered distant and blurry photos of the moons, more powerful telescopes could be used to capture more detailed images. The drawback, however, is that these telescopes have smaller fields of vision and would require taking several more images.

Now that the moons have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the research team will now have the right to name them. Ashton is reportedly optimistic about future discoveries as telescope technology advances, stating that he believes there are easily thousands of moons in orbit around Saturn.

Elizabeth Day at Imperial College London says that one day, there may even be commercial reasons for having accurate maps of the solar system. “We might want to extract resources from asteroids and moons in the solar system, so having a great understanding of what is where is important for that,” says Day.