Daily News

posted on Oct. 26: Researchers discover four additional moons around Saturn

Saturn re-takes the lead as the planet with the most-known satellites following the discovery of at least four additional moons. The announcement was made today in Pasadena, California at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society. The discoveries were made by an international team of astronomers: Brett Gladman (an expatriate Canadian), Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur; JJ Kavelaars, McMaster University, Canada; Matthew Holman and Brian Marsden, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and Phil Nicholson and Joeseph A. Burns of Cornell University. McMaster researcher JJ Kavelaars says, "The newly discovered irregular moons are small, about 10 to 50 kilometres across, in line with the size of other irregular moons. They are likely icy moons, the remnants of a long-ago capture event." Observed from Earth, these moons appear as faint dots of light moving around Saturn. Two of the moons were discovered using the European Southern Observatory's 2.2-meter telescope and the other two were discovered using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. (Telescope images are available at http://pinks.physics.mcmaster.ca/Saturn/ Photo above of Saturn's known satellites from Web site mentioned above