Re:Twenty New Moons Found Orbiting Saturn
by magduf on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @10:52AM
(#21192934)
>Keep in mind all of these new objects are quite small, just a few miles across. About a billion of them could fit inside Saturn's largest moon, Titan (seventeen were discovered).
With planets, we started getting too many "planets" when we discovered more and more really tiny ones, so we started coming up with new names for them: "dwarf planet", "Trojan", "asteroid", etc. A small rock in the asteroid belt orbits the Sun, but it still isn't called a "planet".
It sounds like we need to do something similar with moons, or else it's going to get out of control. There's likely an absurd number of small rocks orbiting Saturn and Jupiter; should they really all be called "moons"?
With planets, we started getting too many "planets" when we discovered more and more really tiny ones, so we started coming up with new names for them: "dwarf planet", "Trojan", "asteroid", etc. A small rock in the asteroid belt orbits the Sun, but it still isn't called a "planet".
It sounds like we need to do something similar with moons, or else it's going to get out of control. There's likely an absurd number of small rocks orbiting Saturn and Jupiter; should they really all be called "moons"?