A team of American astronomers announced the discovery of 20 previously unknown satellites of Saturn, which allowed him to increase their current number to 82 and, thereby, overtake Jupiter, which lost leadership and now takes second place with its 79 moons.
Using the largest telescopes in the world, we are now completing an inventory of small satellites from giant planets that play a decisive role in our understanding of how the Solar System was formed and developed.
-Scott Shepard of the Carnegie Institute (USA), who led the observations
The size of each of the open satellites is about five kilometers. Seventeen of them are retrograde, that is, they revolve around Saturn in the direction opposite to its rotation around its axis. The remaining three moons are barren, with two of them making one revolution around Saturn in about 2 Earth years, and the third in three or more Earth years.
Astronomers speculate that all of these shallow moons were once part of more than large satellites that were destroyed in collisions with objects that came from outside, such as asteroids or comets. And this should have happened after the completion of the formation of Saturn, since otherwise they would have fallen on him for a long time.
20 new Saturn satellites has been discovered
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