Astronomy

Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system.Until recently, the “moon king” title was held by Jupiter, but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined. The team behind the discoveries had previously identified 62 Saturnian moons using the Canada France Hawaii telescope and, having seen faint hints that there were more out there, made further observations in 2023.“Sure enough, we found 128 new moons,” said the lead researcher, Dr Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sincia in Taiwan. “Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up.”There are 95 moons of Jupiter wit...

Two days after Christmas, the Atlas sky survey team discovered a new rocky object in Earth’s astronomical neighbourhood. Atlas discovers near-Earth objects all the time: in 2024, the team discovered 167 of them. They also codiscovered comet Tsuchinshan–Atlas, which dazzled sky gazers last autumn. But this discovery was special: there’s a chance the 40-90 metre object, known as 2024 YR4, will hit Earth in 2032.In January, the impact probability was estimated to be just over 1%, then it was raised to 2.3% in early February. As of this week, the Nasa JPL Center for Near Earth Object Studies has raised that to 3.1% – or about 1-in-32 chance of impact.There are four reasons I’m not worried just yet. First, the possible impact would be in December 2032, so we’ve got time to prepare. Second, the ...