Saturn surpasses Jupiter?
A team of American scientists has discovered 20 more moons orbiting Saturn, dubbed the 'Ring Planet', bringing the total number of moons belonging to Saturn to 82.
These moons were discovered using the Subaru Telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The newly discovered moons are about 5 km (3 miles) in diameter. 17 of them move backwards in the direction of Saturn's rotation.
This is called the retrograde direction. The other three moons move in the direction of Saturn's rotation.
Two-thirds of the advanced moons take two years to orbit Saturn.
Like most distant backward moons, one forward moon takes more than three years to complete one orbit around Saturn.
"Studying the orbits of these moons can reveal their origins as well as the conditions around Saturn when they formed," said Dr. Scott Shepherd of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, who led the research team.
Dr. Shepherd told the BBC News that Jupiter was considered the most lunar planet since the late 1990s.
The moons farthest from Saturn orbit around the planet and are divided into three distinct clusters based on tilt and angle.
Scientists speculate that these backward and forward moons are the broken remains of at least three large objects. These large objects are believed to have split between different moons or to collide with asteroids.
One of the newly discovered backward moons is the moon farthest from Saturn.
"These moons are in a slightly sloping orbit and are very far away from Saturn, so we don't think they formed with Saturn.
It is believed that Saturn orbited in the form of a cloud or a 'disk' of dust and gas during the formation of Saturn during its youth in the Solar System. This may scatter the energy of objects passing Saturn.
Many of these objects later orbited Saturn in a spiral and later became part of that planet.ේ
References - BBC Sinhala
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