By Stephanie Dwilson | 2026-01-14

The discovery of 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, made by an international team using images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope during a multi-year campaign, demonstrates the impact of international collaboration in astronomy.

It is just one example of how, working together and sharing resources and brainpower, nations can facilitate new discoveries in space.

Led by postdoctoral fellow Edward Ashton of Academia Sinica's Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, the team was able to identify 128 new moons orbiting Saturn, toppling the previous planetary frontrunner.

The discoveries propelled Saturn’s total moon count to 274, putting it ahead of Jupiter, which, with 95 confirmed moons, was at one time considered to have the most natural satellites orbiting it.

"Based on our projections, I don’t think Jupiter will ever catch up," Ashton said.

Ashton’s team, which included astronomers Mike Alexandersen of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Jean-Marc Petit of the Observatoire de Besancon in France, announced the new discoveries last March.

They made their observations by stacking images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, a 3.6-meter optical-infrared telescope positioned near the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii.

The team used the telescope to repeatedly observe Saturn between 2019 and 2021 and combined the images. They found 64 new moons orbiting the planet.

Then they observed Saturn again for three more months in 2023 and found 128 additional new moons, raising the total to 274.

Irregular moons hint at past collision

"Our carefully planned multi-year campaign has yielded a bonanza of new moons that tell us about the evolution of Saturn's irregular natural satellite population," Ashton said in a statement.

Each of these newly identified moons is only a few kilometers across.

According to NASA, any "naturally formed bodies that orbit planets" can be designated as moons, and they come in all shapes and sizes.

Some are regular, meaning they formed at the same time as the planet, and others are irregular, and may have been smaller captured planets that broke apart.

All of Saturn's newly discovered moons are irregular moons, according to professor Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia's department of Physics and Astronomy.

Most likely, they are fragments of larger objects that were captured by Saturn and shattered in collisions with other moons or comets in the last 100 million years.

"These moons are a few kilometers in size and are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other Saturnian moons or with passing comets," he said.

Ashton and his team hypothesized that these moons may have originated from a significant collision that occurred in a cluster of irregular Saturn moons known as the Mundilfari group.

This is a subgroup of small, irregular moons orbiting Saturn, named after its largest moon, Mundilfari, which is part of Saturn's larger Norse group of moons.

While the new moons don’t have names yet, they will ultimately be named based on Norse, Inuit and Gallic mythology, following the celestial naming convention of the International Astronomical Union.

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, in operation for 45 years, aims to provide a state-of-the-art observational facility for the scientific community.

It is a joint facility of the National Research Council of Canada, the Centre Nacional de la Recherche Scientifique of France, and the University of Hawaii.