Wikinews

Twelve more moons of Saturn discovered

Wednesday, May 4, 2005 Astronomers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy today announced their discovery of twelve further moons of Saturn, bringing the total number of moons discovered so far to 46. The initial discovery of the satellites was on December 12, 2004, and was made using the 8.2 metre Subaru telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory. Confirmational observations were then conducted throughout January, February, and March from the Subaru telescope and from the Gemini North telescope.

Similar teams at the university led by David Jewitt discovered 11 moons of Jupiter in 2001, and a further 11 in 2002, before turning their attentions to Saturn.

11 of the newly discovered moons are in retrograde orbits, leading astronomers to hypothesize that they were originally asteroids, attracted out of the asteroid belt by Jupiter's gravity and then captured by Saturn. All of the moons are in inclined elliptical orbits, that range from 16 million to 22 million kilometres in distance from Saturn. As a point of reference, Earth's moon is an average of 384,403 kilometres from the Earth. The new moons of Saturn are provisionally named S/2004 S07 through to S/2004 S18.

Sources

 

Share this:           


 

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

  This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
Retrieved from "https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Twelve_more_moons_of_Saturn_discovered&oldid=4827876"