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Twenty additional moons have been identified around Saturn, raising the total to 82. This surpasses the previous record holder, Jupiter, which has 79 moons. One of the new moons has the most distant known orbit around Saturn, and their sizes are all around three miles (5 kilometers). Two of the moons orbit the planet in around two years, while the remaining 18 require more than three. Seventeen of the newly discovered moons circle Saturn in the opposite direction of the planet’s other natural satellites. The orbit s of the retrograde moons are comparable to those of Saturn’s other known moons. And based on their inclinations, astronomers assume that these moons previously belonged to a much bigger moon that split apart eons ago.   The moons were identified by a team led by Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science using the Subaru Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. By observing these tiny moons and their interactions with the major planets, astronomer...

Ground-based telescopes delivered the first real-time view of a red supergiant star’s death throes. While they are neither the brightest nor most massive stars, they are the biggest in terms of volume. An artist’s rendition of a red supergiant star transitioning into a Type II supernova Betelgeuse is a well-known red supergiant star that has gained popularity owing to its erratic fading. While it was projected that Betelgeuse would explode as a supernova, it has remained stable. However, the star at the core of this new study, which is situated roughly 120 million light-years from Earth in the NGC 5731 galaxy, had ten times the mass of the sun when it exploded. An artist’s rendition of a red supergiant star transitioning into a Type II supernova, emitting a violent eruption of radiation and gas on its dying breath before collapsing and exploding. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko Some stars have explosive eruptions or emit blazing hot layers of gas just befo...