Skytalk

Saturn pulls ahead of Jupiter in the number of moons detected – current score: 82 to 79 Researchers recently announced the discovery of 20 new moons orbiting Saturn by using big telescopes at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea observatory equipped with very sensitive detectors. 17 of them orbit backwards, opposite the planet’s direction of rotation, and most of the new ones are about three miles in size. The current idea about their origin is that they are the detritus left over from the breakup of a moon not long after Saturn’s formation billions of years ago. When we think about all the energetic activity happening out there in the universe – supermassive black holes, millisecond pulsars, colliding neutron stars, exploding supernovae – it’s nice to know that in our little corner of the universe not much is happening, right? Hold your horses, because maybe we’re just in between happenings. Astronomers announced earlier this week that evidence has been detected that an enorm