{"id":92278,"date":"2019-10-07T21:31:39","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T21:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/discovery-of-20-moons-puts-saturn-ahead-of-jupiter\/"},"modified":"2019-10-07T21:31:39","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T21:31:39","slug":"discovery-of-20-moons-puts-saturn-ahead-of-jupiter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/discovery-of-20-moons-puts-saturn-ahead-of-jupiter\/","title":{"rendered":"Discovery of 20 moons puts Saturn ahead of Jupiter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This
This 2013 image, made available from NASA, shows Saturn\u2019s rings and planet Earth, center right, as seen from the Cassini spacecraft.<\/span>Associated Press file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Twenty new moons have been found around Saturn, giving the ringed planet a total of 82, scientists said Monday. That beats Jupiter and its 79 moons.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was fun to find that Saturn is the true moon king,\u201d said astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s any consolation to the Jupiter crowd, our solar system\u2019s biggest planet \u2013 Jupiter \u2013 still has the biggest moon. Jupiter\u2019s Ganymede is almost half the size of Earth. By contrast, Saturn\u2019s 20 new moons are minuscule, each barely 3 miles (5 kilometers) in diameter.<\/p>\n

Sheppard and his team used a telescope in Hawaii to spot Saturn\u2019s 20 new moons over the summer. About 100 even tinier moons may be orbiting Saturn, still waiting to be found, he said.<\/p>\n

Astronomers have pretty much completed the inventory of moons as small as 3 miles (5 kilometers) around Saturn and 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) around Jupiter, according to Sheppard. Future larger telescopes will be needed to see anything smaller.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s harder spotting mini moons around Saturn than Jupiter, Sheppard said, given how much farther Saturn is.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo seeing that Saturn has more moons even though it is harder to find them, shows just how many moons Saturn has collected over time,\u201d he wrote in an email. These baby moons may have come from larger parent moons that broke apart right after Saturn formed.<\/p>\n

Seventeen of Saturn\u2019s new moons orbit the planet in the opposite, or retrograde, direction. The other three circle in the same direction that Saturn rotates. They\u2019re so far from Saturn that it takes two to three years to complete a single orbit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese moons are the remnants of the objects that helped form the planets, so by studying them, we are learning about what the planets formed from,\u201d Sheppard wrote.<\/p>\n

Just last year, Sheppard found 12 new moons around Jupiter. The Carnegie Institution had a moon-naming contest for them; another is planned now for Saturn\u2019s new moons .<\/p>\n

The jury is still out on whether any planets beyond our solar system have even more moons. For now, Saturn has the most known moons.<\/p>\n

Monday\u2019s announcement came from the International Astronomical Union\u2019s Minor Planet Center.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2013 image, made available from NASA, shows Saturn\u2019s rings and planet Earth, center right, as seen from the Cassini spacecraft.Associated Press file Twenty new moons have been found around Saturn, giving the ringed planet a total of 82, scientists said Monday. That beats Jupiter and its 79 moons. \u201cIt was fun to find that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":92279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5737,5736,5735],"tags":[28],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-92278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines","category-local-news","category-news","tag-headlines"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92278"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=92278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}