| Saturn has 274 Moons! (2025-3-15) ⬅︎ |
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Astronomers recently found 128 more moons orbiting Saturn, bringing its total to 274 moons! That’s more moons than all the other planets in our solar system combined.
To find these new moons, which are mostly tiny (around 1 km), astronomers used a clever method called ‘shift and stack.’ They combined multiple images over time to spot the tiny objects moving around.
These moons are called irregulars because their orbits are super wobbly, tilted way off Saturn’s equator, and often move backwards compared to Saturn’s spin.
Here’s something strange: these moons are found in groups or swarms, which suggests they’re pieces of bigger moons that broke apart after collisions with other objects. Our solar system is full of collisions, and Saturn’s moons are proof of that wild past.
Okay -- let's have a contest to see who can spot the new moons! Unfortunately, stargazers with backyard telescopes can’t see them -- they’re just too small and dim. But we can spot Saturn’s six largest moons and here’s a list of them from brightest to dimmest:
| Top 6 Moons |
Brightness
Magnitude |
Telescope
Minimum |
Cool Facts |
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+9.0 |
4”
100mm |
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn (5,149 km) and even larger than the planet Mercury. It is the brightest of Saturn's moons and the easiest to see. Very strangely, it has an atmosphere — the only moon in our solar system with one. Like Earth's atmosphere, it is mostly nitrogen, but it also has a lot of methane. Being so cold, Titan’s surface has lakes of liquid methane and ethane. |
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+10.1 |
6”
150mm |
Rhea is Saturn’s second largest moon (1,527 km) but it is far smaller than Titan and even smaller than Earth's moon (3,475 km). It is over twice as dim as Titan and harder to see. It is an ice world with a rocky core. |
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+10.7 |
6”
150mm |
Tethys is a small (1,023 km) ice moon that orbits close to Saturn. It has a massive canyon (Ithaca Chasma) that stretches across the moon and a gigantic crater (Odysseus Crater). |
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+10.9 |
6”
150mm |
Dione (1,123 km) is an icy world, heavily cratered and cracked. It may have liquid water below its surface. |
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+11.5 |
6”
150mm |
Although Iapetus (1470 km) is nearly the same size as Rhea, it is over 3 times dimmer. Part of it is bright but a large part is quite dark, possibly covered in organic compounds, making it hard to see.
|
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+12.3 |
8”
200mm |
Enceladus is a small (504 km) ice moon and difficult to see, being over twenty times dimmer than Titan. It has gotten a lot of attention ever since geysers shooting water into space were photographed by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. With liquid water confirmed, could Enceladus harbor life? |
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