Hidden Moon Lurk in Saturn's Rings, page 1

Greetings, ATS!

Discovery News is reporting that mini-moons have been discovered in the rings of Saturn.

Like Jupiter, Saturn is orbited by a large extended family of moons — 62, at last count — ranging in size from the gigantic 3,200-mile-wide Titan, wrapped in thick clouds, to the barely 2-mile-wide Methone, smooth as a river rock. But there are even more moons in the ringed planet’s retinue, tiny worlds embedded inside the icy rings themselves. Even with the Cassini spacecraft they are nearly impossible to see… until they give themselves away with their shining “propellers.”

I don't think these are moons in the traditional sense, but nevertheless I found it fascinating. Hope you enjoy.

reply to post by smyleegrl

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So what are moons exactly. As far as I understand Moons are Lunar Terrians, as our nearest moon makes evidence of such. These new claims, and indeed the newly introduced re-classification as to what constitutes as ;moon is plain dumb. More confusing tech babble that should be dismissed. Shoeboxed sized space debris are not moons.

reply to post by Tindalos2013

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Yup it has 60

www.universetoday.com...

Ooops correction it does have 62 moons.

science.yourdictionary.com...

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

Originally posted by boymonkey74
reply to post by Tindalos2013

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Yup it has 60

www.universetoday.com...

Ooops correction it does have 62 moons.

science.yourdictionary.com...

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

That's what the sources say, but I don't think so....there are over 100 if you count what's in this small sample, and probably over 1000 since we don't seem to know exactly what a moon is:

Moons of Saturn

a precise number of Saturnian moons cannot be given, as there is no objective boundary between the countless small anonymous objects that form Saturn's ring system and the larger objects that have been named as moons. At least 150 moonlets embedded in the rings have been detected by the disturbance they create in the surrounding ring material, though this is thought to be only a small sample of the total population of such objects.

I tried to find a definition of a moon, then found something called a "moonlet":

Moonlet is an informal term for a particularly small natural satellite. In astronomical literature, it has been used in at least two situations

But since it's an informal term, we still have the problem of not having a good definition of a moon.

So we need 149 more of these threads, for the remaining 149 moons/moonlets in Saturn's rings that are thought to be there, and if that's only a small sample, probably over 1000 more.

Anyone care to make a better definition of a moon? Seems like we need one, maybe using mass, or size dimension, as the cutoff for the "objective boundary between the countless small anonymous objects that form Saturn's ring system and the larger objects that have been named as moons".

reply to post by Astyanax

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Your guess is as good as mine, but yes, there's a lot.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

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I am going to define a moon right now....

Lets call a moon any object orbiting a planet whose mass is greater than 1% of its "parent" planet..

Just made it up so dont know how good it is.....could have chose 5% but thought that may disallow some obvious moons around Jupiter dues to Jupiters profound size...

What do yall think?

Christosterone

Originally posted by Christosterone
reply to post by Arbitrageur

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I am going to define a moon right now....

Lets call a moon any object orbiting a planet whose mass is greater than 1% of its "parent" planet..

Just made it up so dont know how good it is.....could have chose 5% but thought that may disallow some obvious moons around Jupiter dues to Jupiters profound size...

What do yall think?

Christosterone

Jupiter is pretty damn heavy, 1% may even be too little to classify any of it's moons in such a way.

1.8986×10^27 kg, that's 317.83 Earth masses, so Earth wouldn't even be considered a moon of Jupiter with that definition. Good idea, but it could get complicated. I believe Mars' moon phobos is less than 1% of it's mass as well.

Originally posted by boymonkey74
reply to post by Tindalos2013

---

Yup it has 60

www.universetoday.com...

Ooops correction it does have 62 moons.

science.yourdictionary.com...

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov...

edit on 28-2-2013 by boymonkey74 because: (no reason given)

There's 61 according to my iOS app "Planets."

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