Twelve more moons of Saturn discovered

May 4, 2005 Astronomers at the  today announced their discovery of twelve further moons of, bringing the total number of moons discovered so far to 46. The initial discovery of the satellites was on December 12, 2004, and was made using the 8.2 metre at the. Confirmational observations were then conducted throughout January, February, and March from the Subaru telescope and from the telescope.

Similar teams at the university led by discovered 11 moons of Jupiter in 2001, and a further 11 in 2002, before turning their attentions to Saturn.

11 of the newly discovered moons are in, leading astronomers to hypothesize that they were originally asteroids, attracted out of the asteroid belt by Jupiter's gravity and then captured by Saturn. All of the moons are in inclined elliptical orbits, that range from 16 million to 22 million kilometres in distance from Saturn. As a point of reference, Earth's is an average of 384,403 kilometres from the Earth. The new moons of Saturn are provisionally named S/2004 S07 through to S/2004 S18.