A team of astronomers from Taiwan, Canada, the US and France discovered 128 new moons in 2023 using the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). However, the moons were not officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union, the governing body for such matters, until Tuesday, March 11.

Most of the moons are irregular and small. For comparison, our Moon has a diameter of 3.475 kilometers. But they have proven orbits around Saturn, which is a key element of the Moon's official candidacy, reports KosovaPress.

"These moons are a few kilometers in size and are likely all fragments of a smaller number of originally captured moons that were broken apart by violent collisions, either with other moons of Saturn or with passing comets," Brett Gladman, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia, said in a statement.

Perhaps most impressively, this discovery of 128 new moons wasn't the first time this team had added to the number of Saturn's moons. Between 2019 and 2021, the team's observations with CFHT resulted in the addition of 62 moons to Saturn's count.

"With the knowledge that these were probably moons, and that there were likely more waiting to be discovered, we revisited the same sky areas for three consecutive months in 2023," said lead researcher Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica. "Sure enough, we found 128 new moons."

Saturn's first moon, Titan, was discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens, and in the following decades, Jean-Dominique Cassini discovered Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, and Tethys.

The development of massive telescopes and the launch of space probes like Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and Cassini have allowed us to see even more of Saturn's moons. But for now, the team suspects we may be maxing out.

"With current technology I don't think we can do much better than what has already been done for the moons around Saturn, Uranus and Neptune," Ashton said.