I was so thrilled with the amount of public engagement over the Jupiter moon-naming contest that we've decided to do another one to name these newly discovered Saturnian moons, this time, the moons must be named after giants from Norse, Gallic or Inuit mythology.

Scott Sheppard

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Using some of the largest telescopes in the world, we are now completing the inventory of small moons around the giant planets, they play a crucial role in helping us determine how our Solar System's planets formed and evolved.

Scott Sheppard
top-news

In the Solar System's youth, the Sun was surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust from which the planets were born. It is believed that a similar gas-and-dust disk surrounded Saturn during its formation, the fact that these newly discovered moons were able to continue orbiting Saturn after their parent moons broke apart indicates that these collisions occurred after the planet formation process was mostly complete and the disks were no longer a factor.

Scott Sheppard
top-news

Studying the orbits of these moons can reveal their origins, as well as information about the conditions surrounding Saturn at the time of its formation.

Scott Sheppard
top-news
Its very faint, its on the edge of our ability to detect it. by Scott Sheppard

Its very faint, its on the edge of our ability to detect it.

Scott Sheppard
science

This is hot off the presses, it's very faint, on the edge of our ability to detect it. It was just discovered in our data from last month.

Scott Sheppard
top-news

These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X, the more of them we can find, the better we can understand the outer Solar System and the possible planet that we think is shaping their orbits -- a discovery that would redefine our knowledge of the Solar System's evolution.

Scott Sheppard
top-news

We are very uniform in our sky coverage and can find all types of orbits, yet we seem to only be finding objects with similar types of orbits that are on the same side of the sky, suggesting something is shepherding them into these similar types of orbits, which we believe is Planet X, what makes this result really interesting is that Planet X seems to affect 2015 TG387 the same way as all the other extremely distant Solar System objects. These simulations do not prove that there's another massive planet in our Solar System, but they are further evidence that something big could be out there.

Scott Sheppard
top-news
I think we are nearing the 90 % likelihood of Planet X being real... by Scott Sheppard

I think we are nearing the 90 % likelihood of Planet X being real with this discovery.

Scott Sheppard
top-news

This new object has the largest orbit of all the extremely distant objects that stay well beyond Pluto.

Scott Sheppard
top-news
They can be used as probes to understand what is happening at the... by Scott Sheppard

They can be used as probes to understand what is happening at the edge of Solar System.

Scott Sheppard
top-news

It’s fairly faint. We don’t know its precise orbit yet and we don’t know anything about its chemical composition, we can guess at its size. We don’t know how much light it reflects. If it reflects a lot of light, if it’s very bright, it will be a smaller object. If it’s a darker object and doesn’t reflect much light, it would be much bigger.

Scott Sheppard
science

Most objects that we know of interact with the planets in some way so the orbits have been disturbed over the past few billion years, whereas this object is so distant that it may not have been disturbed by planets. So its orbit is a pristine orbit from the formation of the original solar system. If we can get its orbit and understand how it formed and how it got there, it will tell us a lot about the formation of our solar system.

Scott Sheppard
science

This object may allow us to be able to find a much bigger object that is out in our solar system, and if there is a really big object out in the very far outer part of our solar system, it would be very hard to explain that with what we know about solar system formation.

Scott Sheppard
science

If you do the math by how slow it was moving, you can predict how far it is and this object appears to be the most distant object ever observed in our solar system.

Scott Sheppard
science
People believe there may be a massive planet in the very outer pa... by Scott Sheppard

People believe there may be a massive planet in the very outer part of our solar system.

Scott Sheppard
science
It would pretty much revolutionize our thinking how solar systems... by Scott Sheppard

It would pretty much revolutionize our thinking how solar systems form.

Scott Sheppard
science
We can't explain these objects' orbits from what we know about th... by Scott Sheppard

We can't explain these objects' orbits from what we know about the solar system.

Scott Sheppard
top-news
We can't really classify the object yet, as we don't know its orb... by Scott Sheppard

We can't really classify the object yet, as we don't know its orbit.

Scott Sheppard
science

It is very much like looking for a needle in a haystack as the night sky covers a very large area that can only be searched one telescope pointing at a time.

Scott Sheppard
science