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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.
Any notion of why the Earth has only one moon and other planets have hundreds?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone
my understanding is that a good feature of the goldilocks zone is that it has fewer small objects than the outer planets region. maybe someone with better knowledge can pipe up.
Any notion of why the Earth has only one moon and other planets have hundreds?
And does it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claimed_moons_of_Earth#Modern_...)
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.
That was my immediate thought - that the definition of ‘moon’ must have recently changed.
Nooo, my sci-fi novels!!
git commit -am 'Needs more moons'Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Then why don't they orbit in the same direction, as the planets do? Aren't many moons gravitationally captured in any case?
All of the discovered retrograde orbiting moons are in similar orbits which suggests they all came from some larger object broken apart. Keep in mind all of these new objects are quite small, just a few miles across. About a billion of them could fit inside Saturn's largest moon, Titan (seventeen were discovered).
Regular moon fits with what I was talking about before.
Irregular moons are the ones with eccentric, retrograde, or otherwise weird orbits and acquisition histories.
The more you get into specifics about this kind of thing, the less concise and accurate you can be, it would take an expert up to date with the literature to go much deeper.