Astronomers keep finding new moons of Jupiter and Saturn

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A multitude of new moons have made their presence known around Jupiter and Saturn, bringing their moon populations to 101 and 285, respectively.

The new findings also bring the total number of known moons orbiting planets and dwarf planets worldwide. solar system to 442 – and that doesn’t include the many moons accompanying various asteroids or small Kuiper Belt objects.

Newly discovered moons – four for Jupiter and 11 for Saturn — were announced by the Minor Planet Center, which is the clearinghouse for astronomical asteroid discoveries, cometscentaurs and, of course, moons.

None of the recently discovered moons are very large, with an average diameter of about 3 kilometers. They have very large orbits, much larger than the largest moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and are extremely faint, between 25 and 27 magnitude. (For context, our moon is at magnitude -12.6.) This puts them well beyond the range of backyard telescopes.

Instead, it took intense observations from some of our largest ground-based telescopes to catch them. Jupiter’s four new moons were all discovered by astronomers Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and David Tholen of the University of Hawaii, using the 6.5-meter Magellan-Baade Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the 8-meter Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Meanwhile, Saturn’s 11 new moons were discovered by a team led by Edward Ashton of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. They used the Canada-France-Hawaii 3.5 meter telescope on Mauna Kea. This comes after Ashton led a team to discover 128 new moons of Saturn no later than 2025.

Sheppard and Ashton in particular are prodigious discoverers of moons in the solar system, with more than 200 each to their credit, many of them co-discoveries.

While Jupiter lags behind Saturn quite significantly in the lunar stakes, Europe Clipper and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), currently en route to Jupiter, could restore balance when they arrive in the Jovian system in the early 2030s.

To summarize, the current count is that of planets, Earth has a moon, March has two, Jupiter has 101, Saturn has 285, Uranus at 28 and Neptune has 16 while Venus and Mercury do not. For dwarf planets, Pluto has five, Eris has one, Makemake has one, Hauméa has two and Ceres has none.

New moons of Jupiter announced in Minor Planet Electronic Circulars MPEC 2026-F09, F10, F11 And F12and the 11 new moons of Saturn were declared in MPEC 2026-F14.