General Discussions

[kruddler]

Like the change in the definition of Pluto, you might want to investigate "What is a Moon, and how it is defined?"

Technically these bodies are satellites, whether a satellite is natural or man made makes little difference, nobody "in the trade" calls them moons, moon is outreach / media speak things that go around a planet.

It's a bit like when referring to stars the media call them suns, there is really only one moon, moon is a satellite of earth!

You didn't read my post before this one of yours, or the article highlighted.

But it's not sufficient just to spot an object near a planet and declare that you've found a new moon. The object needs to be tracked – ideally for several orbits – so that its path can be analyzed to determine if it's stable. So while shifting and stacking can reveal faint objects, taking many such observations is needed to confirm moon status.

The number of 'moons' is dependent on how many of them have been tracked and deemed stable enough to be a moon.

As i said earlier, given both Jupiter and Saturn have rings, obviously made up of rocks and/or ice, the number of 'moons' will increase exponentially once we work out how to track them properly.

All of them orbit a planet.
All of them would be deemed stable.
Size doesn't matter.
So all of them are essentially moons under the current 'definition'.
I suspect a new one will be made soon ala Drawf planets to exclude a lot of these recently found moons.