The team of Scott Sheppard, David Jewitt, Jan Kleyna, et al, of the Carnegie Institute, has announced that 20 satellites of Saturn have been confirmed, and hence are ready to be named.

All have diameters less than 10 km and are more than 15 million km distance from Saturn. Although these were all announced as confirmed yesterday, most of them are based on data recorded in a period beginning in 2004, recorded from Mauna Kea. These announcements are being made following more detailed analysis of archival data.

This brings the number of known Saturnian satellites to 82, passing Jupiter’s current count, 79.

https://sites.google.com/carnegiescience.edu/sheppard/moons/saturnmoons

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-08/saturn-jupiter-moons-astronomy-carnegie-institution-for-science/11583138

dv said:

The team of Scott Sheppard, David Jewitt, Jan Kleyna, et al, of the Carnegie Institute, has announced that 20 satellites of Saturn have been confirmed, and hence are ready to be named.

All have diameters less than 10 km and are more than 15 million km distance from Saturn. Although these were all announced as confirmed yesterday, most of them are based on data recorded in a period beginning in 2004, recorded from Mauna Kea. These announcements are being made following more detailed analysis of archival data.

This brings the number of known Saturnian satellites to 82, passing Jupiter’s current count, 79.

https://sites.google.com/carnegiescience.edu/sheppard/moons/saturnmoons

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-08/saturn-jupiter-moons-astronomy-carnegie-institution-for-science/11583138

Bloody interesting. Not anywhere near the rings at all.

Each of the newly discovered moons is about five kilometers in diameter. Seventeen of them orbit the planet backwards, or in a retrograde direction.

The new moons were discovered using the Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

I would dearly like to know how they managed, with an Earthbound telescope, to block out the extremely bright nearby light of Saturn.