A team of astronomers led by Dr. Edward Ashton, a researcher at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, has discovered 128 new moons of Saturn using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) located on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center has recognized the discovery of 128 new moons of Saturn on March 11, 2025. They added the discovery of 61 moons, 34 moons, and 33 moons in three batches.
The discovery brings Saturn’s total number of moons to 274 – the highest number in our solar system. The second highest number of moons belongs to Jupiter, with 95 recognized moons.
All 128 new moons are in the category of irregular moons, which are thought to have been captured by Saturn long ago.
“These moons are a few kilometers in size and are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets,” Dr. Brett Gladman, a co-author of the research paper and a professor in the UBC department of physics and astronomy, said in a statement.
Irregular moons are characterized by their large, elliptical, and tilted orbits compared to regular moons. Currently, Saturn has 250 irregular moons, including the 128 new moons.
Researchers used the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) to repeatedly monitor the skies around Saturn between 2019 and 2021, when they initially discovered 62 moons and a larger number of objects that could not be designated at the time.
The team revisited the same sky fields for three consecutive months in 2023, which added a whopping 128 new moons to Saturn’s count.
Please bookmark Spaceandtelescope.com or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get latest space news, upcoming skywatching events and astronomy-related content.
