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Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

dtm.carnegiescience.edu

41–50 of 69 posts

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#41
post #2

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.

That visualization is awesome! Everyone try it. You can easily zoom in and our and rotate in any of the 3 axis. It's amazing to see how far away these 'new moons' are from being in the same plane as the older, larger moons.

Is there an astro term for differentiating the planar moons and the outer ones? That moon cloud looks like as if it is Saturn's Kuiper belt or Oort cloud.

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#42
post #8

I wish they would open up the naming of at least one moon to whatever the internet decides to come up with, rather than restricting it to the same old boring gods and goddesses convention. That moon would probably become one of the more popular celestial bodies in the solar system based on that alone.

I vote for the name being the Unicode character U+1F315.

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are most of these moons from when the solar system formed?

Maybe not, but the angular momentum is. Without a big input of energy and momentum to cause a plane change, anything that forms in the solar system will orbit roughly in the plane of the ecliptic, and will spin on an axis normal to it.

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#45
Isn't the term moon devalued too much by now? Isn't there terminology to classify these newly found 5km natural satelites differently from the massive moons like ours, Ganymede, Europa and so on? Something like dwarf moons or micromoons?

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#46
post #26

Any notion of why the Earth has only one moon and other planets have hundreds?

Of the four terrestrial planets, two have no moons, one has two tiny moons, and one (Earth) has a large moon. The jovian planets have lots of moons, but they are giant planets.

The question is more “why does Earth have a big moon” than “why doesn't Earth have a slew of moons like a jovian planet.”

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#47
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Earth is miniscule in comparison to the planets that have hundreds of moons. Those just have a stronger gravity field

What about Mars?

Mars has two itty-bitty moons, and the other two terrestrial planets have zero moons. Earth’s moon has something like 99.99998% of the mass of all moons of terrestrial planets.

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#48
post #14

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?

That's a good question, and I don't think you'll find an especially convincing answer.

Polar orbits are "unstable" in a few senses, namely that even in an ideal setting orbital planes will precess around central masses that are lumpy rather than spherically symmetric; rotation of a lumpy central mass introduces further precessions. Nodal precession is pretty interesting, for example. One can concoct all sorts of odd orbital changes by perturbing the rotating central mass "under" a test object in stable orbit.

However, in the case of known solar system bodies, slowly shifting a satellite in near-polar orbit into a near-equatorial orbit conflicts with quite a lot of evidence; by the mid 1960s it was pretty safe to say that known inner moons maintain over very long timescales an almost constant orbital inclination with respect to the planet's equator, while outer moons maintain an almost constant orbital inclination with respect to the invariable plane of the solar system. Interesting exceptions are Triton and Earth's moon, both of which have significant inclinations to their planets. Precessions are primarily driven by the planet for the inner moons, and by the sun for the outer moons.

It's probably worth paying some close attention to Uranus and its known moons (and their formation and/or capture) when considering the various thoughts people have put into the thread. Most of the moons and rings have negligible inclination (i.e., they're coplanar with Uranus's equator), and Uranus's extreme axial tilt is intriguing. If the tilt is because of a giant collision, did the relevant moons and rings follow the planetary tilt? Or did they form in the highly-tilted equatorial plane (for some of the moons), or were they captured into the equatorial plane (for others) post-tilt?

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#49
post #45

Isn't the term moon devalued too much by now? Isn't there terminology to classify these newly found 5km natural satelites differently from the massive moons like ours, Ganymede, Europa and so on? Something like dwarf moons or micromoons?

Call them dwarf moons, until they have cleaned away the other moons

Re: Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn

#50
post #17

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…

This is a problem with science reporting in general. Current theories or observations are presented as absolute truth even though they're only approximations of the truth based on our current data and understanding of what's really going on.
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