It is the second smallest of 22 planetary-mass moons – those large enough to be rounded by their own gravity and that orbit regularly around a larger planet. Mimas is among the smaller moons in the Solar System. It was not until 1789 that the German astronomer William Herschel identified Mimas and the icy moon Enceladus. The first of Saturn's moons to be discovered was its largest – Titan, a moon larger than the planet Mercury – by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens in 1655, it was another 16 years bore Jean-Dominique Cassini discovered Iapetus and then later Rhea, Dione and finally Tethys in 1684. Think several years of constant observations.įor centuries of human civilisation, many of our celestial neighbours were too far away for us to discern. Some of the new satellites had been seen before, but there's a lengthy process before the International Astronomical Union officially calls one a moon. However, simply observing a moon does not mean it is officially a moon. So, how did so many of Saturn's moons remain hidden from view? What makes distant moons so hard to find? And how many more might be waiting out there in the blackness of space?Īt last count there were no less than 290 "traditional" moons in our Solar System. Humanity has even sent four spacecraft to Saturn, and still these moons escaped discovery. But it came after astronomers have been peering at Saturn and its satellites for more than three and a half centuries. The discovery took more than two years using a telescope on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The new moons were located by a team led by Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. And the number of Saturn's moons continues to grow with another new discovery added to the list by the same team just weeks later. It also crowned Saturn as the planet with the most orbiting moons, wresting it from its giant neighbour Jupiter in what has been dubbed the " moon race" by some. At a stroke, it raised the number of confirmed moons orbiting this distant leviathan – which lies some 886 million miles (1.3 billion kilometres) from the Sun – to 145. In May this year, astronomers announced that they had found 62 new moons orbiting one of the Solar System's gas giants, the ringed planet Saturn. Working out just how many there are, however, is a constant challenge. It is the most visible of our Solar System's natural satellites, but it is by no means the only one. Ever since humanity began looking skywards, our Moon has stared back at us from its orbit a relatively short distance from our planet.
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