For years it’s been a debate about which has the most moons, we know that Mercury and Venus have none. Our own planet has one moon, and Mars has two small moons. When we reach the outer planets of our solar system, however, the number of moons goes up by a lot. Jupiter the biggest planet in our solar system, has between 80 and 95 to date. Uranus has 27 moons and Neptune has 14. However, most recently new moons of Saturn have been discovered, revealing over 60 unknown moons.
Moon King
Saturn is famous for its dazzling rings, made primarily out of reflective ice and rocks. But now it has the most moons, with a jaw-dropping total of 145 moons. This number is bigger than all of the known moons in the solar system! However, most of these recently discovered moons are smaller than two miles in circumference and are very hard to track.
“Tracking these moons makes me recall playing the kid’s game Dot-to-Dot because we have to connect the various appearances of these moons in our data with a viable orbit,” says Edward Ashton a scientist at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, “but with about 100 different games on the same page and you don’t know which dot belongs to which puzzle.”
These moons also could be false representations of something else, moons of these sizes are very easy to confuse with something else. Some of these so-called moons could be comets or astronomical objects that were in the area and are now in a different location than before. Saturn’s rings are very easily confused with moons sometimes because of the millions of small rocks inside the rings which can cause confusion. So some of these 62 new moons could be a false reading.
And there still is the question of “Are there more moons out there?” and the answer is yes, there are still dozens of moons that have not been discovered. NASA estimates that there are several moons that orbit Jupiter, so we could see Jupiter or other planets get the title of moon king. It’s all a matter of what we can see and discover.