Saturn New Moon

NEW SATURN MOON: Tiny Gem Found in Outer Ring

Based on its brightness, astronomers estimate that the as-yet-unnamed moon is a third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide. This is tiny as far as moons go, but the object is likely the largest in its neighborhood.

Researchers think meteoroid impacts as well as collisions among larger particles within the arc create clouds of dust that spread out to form the G ring.

"Being one of the bigger objects, the moonlet is likely to be hit more often," said Matthew Hedman, a member of the Cassini imaging team, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. This means the moonlet is probably a significant source of ring material, the scientists say.

In the long term, "as this and other objects grind themselves down, it's conceivable they would disappear, and then the G ring would disappear," Hedman noted.

But it's also possible that other, slightly larger moons could be broken into chunks by bombardments, he added. Then, as with the moonlet, collisions with those chunks would generate dust that could cause existing rings to brighten or even new rings to form.

—Victoria Jaggard

Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

National Geographic

Scientists confirmed the moon's existence last summer after analyzing images from Cassini. Saturn has over five dozen moons.

OK so what size demensions are we going to hear about now that there are so many moons. Are we going to have to have certain criteria for a moon to be a moon. are we going to start having lesser moons?

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