Saturn is giving birth to a new moon, but it may be the last

A tiny object travelling along the edge of one of Saturn’s rings could be a tiny new moon in the process of formation.

Image: manjik/Shutterstock

When Carl Murray and his team at Queen Mary University in London were analysing images captured by NASA’s spacecraft Cassini, they spotted a rare, tiny object travelling around the edges of Saturn's A ring.

“We have not seen anything like this before,” said astronomer Carl Murray, the lead author of the study published in Icarus in a statement. “We may be looking at the act of birth, where this object is leaving the rings and heading off to be a moon in its own right.”

Made of ice, rock and dust, Saturn’s rings are nurseries in which all of the planet’s moons have been born, but the formation of Saturn’s 53 known moons and nine candidates may have depleted the rings of much of their moon-forming material. “What’s left is enough to keep the overall ring system alive, but not enough to allow the emergence of any more moons. At 4.5 billion years old, Saturn may at last be ending its child-bearing years”, explained Jeffrey Kluger over at TIME.

Named “Peggy” in honour of Murray’s mother-in-law, the protomoon is growing bigger and bigger as it moves outward and finds its orbit, but there’s still no telling exactly how large it will get.

Will this be Saturn’s last moon? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.

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