Four New Outer Moons Discovered Orbiting Saturn An international team of eight satellite-hunting astronomers has discovered four new outer moons of Saturn. The discovery gives Saturn a total of 22 known moons, one more than the 21 known to be orbiting Uranus.
Nothing is known about the four new Saturnian moons except for their brightness.
Observed from Earth-bound observatories, the moons appear only as faint dots of light moving around the planet. Members of the team, including former Cornell University researcher Brett Gladman and Cornell professors of astronomy Joseph Burns and Philip Nicholson, warn that the findings are still preliminary. And they note that they might have discovered several other objects that could be Saturnian moons. The discovery of the four new moons was made using a technique developed by Gladman while he was a student at Cornell. Gladman, who now works for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, obtained his Ph.D. at Cornell.