Saturn’s moons
By petro c. k.
enough thumbnails
to fill a jar
Saturn has the most moons of any planet in the solar system. As of now there are 83 confirmed moons that aren’t part of Saturn’s ring structure, of which 20 are still unnamed.
Saturn’s rings are made up of orbiting objects ranging in size from microscopic to moonlets hundreds of meters across. So far over 150 moonlets have been detected within the rings but the precise number of Saturnian moons cannot be determined since there is no objective boundary between the countless small anonymous objects that form Saturn’s rings and the larger objects that have been named as moons, but the moonlets that have been detected within the ring system are considered a small amount of the total amount actually there.
Current advances in the technology of telescopes as well as observations by unmanned spacecraft have lead to recent discoveries, with 20 new satellites discovered in 2019 alone, allowing Saturn to overtake Jupiter as the planet with the most known moons.
Postscript: In the interval between the writing of this verse and background information, more moons have been found around Jupiter, overtaking Saturn for the most moons:
Further reading:
‘Saturn’s moons: Facts about the weird and wonderful satellites of the ringed planet’, Space.com: https://www.space.com/20812-saturn-moons.html
‘Saturn Moons’, NASA: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/overview/
‘Astronomers discover 12 new moons around Jupiter, putting count at record-breaking 92’, CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/astronomers-12-new-moons-record/
Author bio:
petro c. k. is a temporal being on a habitable rock spinning in space that tries to compress observations of an infinitesimally small section of the universe into haiku. You can catch up with them on Twitter here: @petro_ck
Check out other sciku by petro c. k. here: ‘Young Star’, ‘Marble’, and ‘Giggling’.