This article comes from the cooperative mediaChuoshareproduced with permission from INSIDE.
Academia Sinica and a multinational team jointly researched and discovered 62 new Saturn satellites. The overall number of Saturn satellites reached 145, more than Jupiter. Saturn once again returned to the throne of the most satellites in the solar system. It has been reported to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for certification announcement .
The Minor Planet Center (MPC), the official organization responsible for collecting data on miniature planets, pointed out at the beginning of this year that it found that the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter, has 12 more satellites, an increase of 15% from the previous 80, and the total number of known satellites has reached 92, making it the largest planet in the solar system. The planet with the most moons.
Wang Xiangyu, a researcher at the Academia Sinica, said in an interview with a reporter from the Central News Agency today that Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sinica, Brett Gladman, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics A multinational team composed of researcher Mike Alexandersen and Jean-Marc Petit, a researcher at the Besançon Observatory in France, discovered 62 Saturn moons.
Wang Xiangyu explained that the newly discovered satellites are very small, the smallest diameter is only 2.5 kilometers, and cannot be directly observed from the telescope. Therefore, the research team stacked the observation data from 2019 to 2021 at various possible speeds of satellites orbiting Saturn. , after discovering a new light point, compare the results of different time stacks, and determine that it is a celestial body orbiting Saturn.
Wang Xiangyu pointed out that the orbits of these 62 newly discovered satellites are mostly elliptical in shape, less perpendicular to Saturn’s rotation axis, and many orbits are quite similar in shape; therefore, it is speculated that they are not satellites formed in the early stages of Saturn’s formation. And it was not so small originally, but a celestial body was captured by Saturn when it passed near Saturn, and then collided with other celestial bodies, breaking into multiple pieces and forming many small satellites.
Wang Xiangyu said that because these satellites are small and their signals are weak, they sometimes look very similar to noise when performing superimposition operations. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish noise from satellites by visual interpretation, and to compare them over a long period of time, ” It is difficult to compare data from different times and judge when it is the same celestial body.” The current research results have been reported to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for certification announcement.
Editor in charge: Anny
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