Moons and Rings: New Discoveries
The most recent lumps of rock to become designated moons are the 19th and 20th moons of Saturn. Discovered by the Voyager 2 probe, they do not have official names yet, so are known simply as 1995-S3 and 1995-S4, after the year of their confirmation as moons. As astronomers continue to study information returned from the giant planets by space probes, and to gather new data in future missions, it is extremely possible that the number of known moons will improve.
Ring systems
You will find four ring systems in our Solar Program, around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Each is created of thousands of millions of pieces, everyone following its own orbit around its planet. Saturn’s rings were the very first to be discovered, in 1610. This ring system is the most extensive, stretching hundreds of a large number of kilo metres across space, but with a depth of at most 2km.
It contains millions of ice-coated rock pieces. The smallest, tends to be furthest from Saturn, are grain-sized. The biggest, which are closest to the planet, are chunks the size of large houses. They form a large number of ringlets, which in turn make seven primary rings surrounding the planet. Uranus’s II rings were the next to be detected, over 350 years following Saturn’s.
They were very first seen from Earth in 1977, and consist of big chunks of a dark material that has yet to become identified. Jupiter’s three-ringed system was found by Voyager 1 in 1979. It may be the thinnest of the four, and created of really fine particles of dark dust. The existence of Neptune’s four rings was confirmed by Voyager 2 in 1989. Like Uranus’s rings, they’re made from large chunks of an unknown dark material.
