Update: The DeTeCt project has announced that the flash was not seen in additional data, so there was no impact on Saturn.

Something may have just hit Saturn – and, if so, an amateur astronomer could hold the key to confirming the event, which would be the first ever recorded on the gas giant.

About are estimated to impact Saturn every year, but no such event has ever been caught on camera. Now, NASA employee and amateur astronomer Mario Rana has recorded images that appear to show just that.

Rana is a contributor to a project called that uses software to analyse images of Jupiter and Saturn in the hopes of picking up the momentary flash of an impact. If two such flashes are caught in different data taken with different telescopes – ruling out the chance that the object is a glitch – then an impact can be verified.

at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, who also works on DeTeCt, says that work is under way to find data that can confirm if Rana’s detected flash is the “signature of a faint impact or if it is just a noisy pixel in the camera”. In particular, astronomers want footage of Saturn taken on 5 July between 9am and 9.15am UTC.

“If only one person sees this flash – and that’s where we’re at the minute – there’s still a very high chance it won’t be real. It’ll just be a speckle in their observations,” says at the University of Leicester, UK. “If somebody else saw the same flash, fantastic, we’ve got an impact.”

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at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, says that the popularity of astronomy as a hobby and the quality of modern telescopes bode well. “There’s a fair chance out there that someone has something that they either haven’t looked at yet, or they just discounted it as a problem they were having,” he says.

That said, even if the impact is verified, there is a limited amount of science that can be done with the data, due to a lack of information about the object. The ideal scenario would be spotting an object ahead of time and being able to make observations so that we know its speed and mass, and therefore be able to judge the effects of its impact against known variables. This happened when the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter in 1994, the first time we had ever had advanced notice of a collision between a comet and a planet.

A further 128 moons have been discovered orbiting Saturn, bringing the planet’s total to 274 – more than there are around all the other planets in our solar system combined. But as advances in telescope technology allow us to spot progressively smaller planetary objects, astronomers face a problem: how tiny can a moon be before it is just a rock?

at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, and his colleagues found the new moons with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, revealing dozens that have previously evaded astronomers. They took hours of images of Saturn, adjusted them for the planet’s movement through the sky and stacked them on top of each other to reveal objects that would otherwise be too dim to see.

All the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres in diameter and are likely to have been formed hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago in collisions between larger moons, says Ashton.

“These are small little rocks floating in space, so some people might not find it quite an achievement,” says Ashton. “But I think it’s important to have a catalogue of all the objects in the solar system.”

Despite the wealth of data gathered by his team, these latest moons still only appear as “fuzzy blobs”, says Ashton. There are more powerful telescopes that could potentially resolve the moons in more detail,��although many have smaller fields of view, which would mean taking many more images, he says.

The newly discovered moons have been recognised by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and Ashton and his team��will now get the right to name them. Ashton, who is Canadian, says he has approached a representative from Canada’s Indigenous peoples for suggestions, but is also mulling the idea of some kind of public naming contest.

Could there be more moons out there? Scientists have spent decades scanning the area around Saturn with increasingly powerful telescopes, which has paid off in recent years. In 2019, 20 new moons were found, and Ashton and his colleagues had already in 2023, separate from the 128 they most recently found. Ultimately, it is likely that further discoveries will require advances in telescope technology, says Ashton, who believes there are easily thousands of moons in orbit around Saturn, even discounting the smaller, rocky debris found in the planet’s rings.

at the Minor Planet Center, which logs planetary bodies for the IAU, says there are likely to be many more moons yet to be found in our solar system as improvements to telescopes allow them to see smaller objects. He says decisions will have to be made about what does and doesn’t count as a moon.

“I do know that the IAU decided that, due to the number of moons that are likely to exist, they’re not going to prioritise naming anything that’s smaller than 1 kilometre. But that’s not the same as them not recognising it as a moon,” says Alexandersen. “They’ll probably only name it if a spacecraft goes to visit it.”

He suggested that the cutoff between what is a moon and what is just a rock particle that makes up part of a planetary ring is probably going to be somewhere between 1 kilometre and 1 metre in diameter. “In the end, it probably won’t be my decision, it’ll be the IAU, which will make up some cutoff which will be more or less controversial – just like the cut for what’s a planet or not. And it’s most likely going to be relatively arbitrary,” says Alexandersen.

at Imperial College London says that, one day, there may even be commercial reasons for having accurate maps of the solar system. “We might want to extract resources from asteroids and moons in the solar system, so having a great understanding of what is where is important for that,” says Day.

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The rings of Saturn could be much older than previously thought and may have formed around the same time as the planet, according to a modelling study. But not all astronomers are convinced, and a researcher who was part of a team that calculated Saturn’s rings to be relatively young argues that the new work doesn’t change their findings.

For most of the 20th century, scientists assumed that Saturn’s rings formed along with the planet, some 4.5 billion years ago. But when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft visited Saturn in 2004, it found that the rings appeared remarkably free of contamination from small space rocks, known as cosmic dust. This pristine appearance indicated they were far younger, with .

Now, at the and his colleagues have calculated that Saturn’s rings should be far more resistant to cosmic dust pollution than previously thought, so could maintain a clean appearance for a long time. Hyodo and his team haven’t calculated a new age for the rings, but suggest that they could be as old as the planet, as astronomers used to believe.

Hyodo and his colleagues first simulated how high-speed cosmic dust, accelerated by Saturn’s gravity, would smash into the rings. They found that the collision would create such extreme temperatures that the impacting dust should be vaporised. This vapour, after spreading out in a cloud, would then condense into charged nanoparticles, similar to particles that Cassini has observed.

The researchers then modelled how these particles would move through Saturn’s magnetic field, and found that only a small proportion would settle onto the rings, with most being pulled into Saturn’s atmosphere or shot back into space. “The efficiency of accretion by Saturn’s rings is only a few per cent, which is much, much smaller than previously assumed,” says Hyodo. This could extend previous estimates of the ring age by hundreds of millions to billions of years, he says.

at the University of Colorado Boulder, a member of the team that calculated the earlier, much younger estimate for the age of Saturn’s rings, says that he and his colleagues used a more complex method than just the ring pollution efficiency, considering how long it takes for material to arrive at the rings and disappear. The value calculated by Hyodo and his colleagues shouldn’t change the overall findings for the age, says Kempf. “We are pretty certain that this is not really telling us that we have to go back to the drawing board.”

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But Hyodo argues that the lower pollution efficiency should dramatically change the age. “They assumed 10 per cent efficiency, we reported 1 per cent. You see from the equation that it becomes 1000 million years, or a billion years.”

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Kempf also says that the new simulations assume that Saturn’s rings are made of solid ice particles, whereas the rings are actually made of softer particles of many more sizes than are modelled in the study. “If you shoot particles in these rather complex, softer structures, the outcome of such collisions will be very different,” he says.

Hyodo argues that this assumption is standard for many similar studies. “Nobody knows what the effect of different ice is,” says Hyodo. “It could further reduce the efficiency or maybe not.”

at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics in France, who wasn’t involved in either age-estimation effort, says the new work suggests that the rings aren’t as young as has been claimed in recent years. “It represents a positive step toward the missing modelling effort required to properly handle the fundamental problem of the formation and evolution of a planetary ring system,” he says.

However, Hyodo and his team still need to improve their modelling to better estimate the rings’ pollution so that they can work out their age more precisely, he says.