21–30 of 69 posts
A peeve I have would be to use a language of certainity ("has moons"): > This brings the ringed planet’s total number of moons to 82, surpassing Jupiter, which has 79 When it's clear we don't have the absolute truth. We need to be humble. It's clear then that Saturn has at least 82 moons. Or maybe not even that, taking account the "lost" moons mentioned in this discussion. Now we believe that Saturn has about 82 moon…
Here's a visualization I made of the Saturn system with an option to highlight the newly discovered moons: https://typpo.github.io/spacekit/examples/saturn/index.html Besides the 20 new moons, I find it interesting that there are 8 "lost" moons. These are objects observed as far back as 2004 - but their current locations are unknown.
Is there a reason why moons don't seem to orbit above Saturn's poles?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason why moons don't seem to orbit above Saturn's poles?
Conservation of angular momentum. Stars and their planetary systems form out of clouds of dust and gas which collapse into a fuzzy disk and then into bodies. The sum of the angular momentum before and after has to be the same so there is a big statistical pressure towards all bodies rotation and orbital planes to be near some average overall plane, there are gravitational forces at work too. Orbits over poles are as…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a reason why moons don't seem to orbit above Saturn's poles?
Moons generally orbit on the same plane as their planet's orbit plane
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moons generally orbit on the same plane as their planet's orbit plane
Is this because polar orbits are unstable in some sense, or because pretty much everything already is in the planet's plane?
I wonder when these are gonna go the way of Pluto: Saturn has n moons and a shit-ton of dwarf moons. Wouldn't know where the threshold is though, because something like Phoebe is an absolute outlier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this because polar orbits are unstable in some sense, or because pretty much everything already is in the planet's plane?
Mostly because of conservation of angular momentum: the solar system formed while spinning, and that direction has been maintained. The cases where this is not true (for example, Uranus has its poles "facing the plane" instead of having them orthogonal to it) are likely due to past collisions with foreign bodies that caused the tilt to appear.
Any notion of why the Earth has only one moon and other planets have hundreds?