Saturn runs rings around Jupiter The International Astronomical Union on Tuesday ratified the recent discovery of 128 previously unknown moons orbiting Saturn, taking the gas giant’s count of known natural satellites to 274. The ratification means Saturn goes well ahead of Jupiter, which has a puny population of 95 known moons. The moons were discovered by a …
Monkeys on the moon, See how they bounce from dune to dune, Came a long way in a gold cocoon. All the way from a green balloon. Look out pa, there's monkeys on the moon! Saturn is blinking, Jupiter's winking, All the kids are singing a tune, "Look out pa, there's monkeys on the moon!"
LOL, I've always loved that song, was this a Guinness voice?
We need to draw a line somewhere. When we got too many planets, we invented a cut off point where anything smaller wasn't a planet anymore. If we don't do the same with moons, we'll get to a stage where every ice particle in Saturn's rings gets classified as a moon.
Any object, however large or small, orbiting a bigger object is a "moon" of said larger object. Thus all planets are also moons. Also many stars, Globular Clusters and galaxies are moons.
This would, of course, necessitate us finding obscure deities after whom we would name dustgrains, hydrogen atoms and water molecules but I'm fairly sure that Humanity has sufficient numbers of gods, demons, godlings, demi-gods and Marvel Superheroes to go around.
Note: this defininition does not differentiate between "real" natural moons and artificial ones so dead space stations, lost spanners, drifting screws from assembly missions, dropped, dried bacon baps and elderly weather satellites would be included. That makes life easier, yes?
What of edge cases where two objects of absolutely equal size orbit each other? We simply decide that *both* are smaller than the other and *both* are moons. That way, we save on bothering to measure them to any degree of precision.
Yes, moons can have moons, too, so the moon, Saturn, can have littler moons.
So a large rock wandering around our solar system is probably going to be attracted by the large gravity planets well away from us, so this is a good and very helpful discovery. It suggests that the chance of a very large strike on the inner planets (Mercury, Venus and our Earth) is lower because there are three very large, high gravity, planets further away. Since our solar system rotates around our galaxy every 200 million years there are occasional other risks if we pass another solar system.
It is as usual in space science a lot more complicated than that. While the gas giants may well deflect objects away from the inner solar system they can equally well deflect otherwise harmless objects into the inner solar system.
Most of the harmful rocks were used up in the early bombardment phases of planetary history. A planet capturing a wandering rock into a stable orbit is incredibly unlikely, there has to be a combination of angle of interception and relative speed that is just right or the rock will alter course but whizz past or smash into it. The majority of these moons (moonlets?) are probably due to collisions of objects already in orbit.
"Look everyone, I just discovered 125 new moons around Saturn!"
"Well done. Now you have to go away and come up with 125 new names for each of those moons.
Make sure you dont reuse already existing names.
And they have to be mythical names.
Oh and nothing rude, or that would upset anybody.
And no names that are considered good in one culture, but bad in another.
And absolutely no Moonie, McMoonfaces allowed.
OK, off you go then...
Oh and you're not allowed back on the telescopes until you've finished naming everything!"
"Nooooooo!!!!"
