Ever since humanity began looking skywards, our Moon has stared back at us from its orbit a relatively short distance from our planet. It is the most visible of our Solar System's natural satellites, but it is by no means the only one.
Working out just how many there are, however, is a constant challenge.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. The discovery took more than two years using a telescope on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. But it came after astronomers have been peering at Saturn and its satellites for more than three and a half centuries.
Source: www.bbc.com
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