At the SJAA astronomy class last month, I glibly commented that
Saturn has the most moons of any planet in the solar system.
Turns out I was wrong: Jupiter has pulled way ahead in the moon
race. According to a web site run by Scott Sheppard of the
University of Hawaii, the latest satellites tally shows: Not all
of these are named. The IAU, as of their conference in July of
2004, lists 101 known planetary satellites in the solar system,
down to 1 km in diameter, and comments dryly, "At some time in
the future it may be advisable to stop naming very small
satellites." On the US Geological Survey's planetary
nomenclature page (the USGS is apparently running a lot of the
IAU's nomenclature programs these days) I count 48 named
satellites of Jupiter, 34 for Saturn, 21 for Uranus and 8 for
Neptune, a total of 111, so it may be that the IAU's web site is
out of date. And what about Earth? How many moons does it have?
Well, all of the web sites just mentioned list only one. But if
you're a fan of the popular web site