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Saturn Gains 128 New Moons, Bringing Its Total to 274

Astronomers say they’ve found greater than 100 new moons round Saturn, probably the results of cosmic smashups that left particles within the planet’s orbit as just lately as 100 million years in the past.
The gasoline big planets of our photo voltaic system have many moons, that are outlined as objects that orbit round planets or different our bodies that aren’t stars. Jupiter has 95 recognized moons, Uranus 28, and Neptune 16. The 128 within the newest haul round Saturn convey its whole to 274.
“It’s the most important batch of latest moons,” mentioned Mike Alexandersen on the Harvard-Smithsonian Heart for Astrophysics, an creator of a paper saying the invention that might be revealed within the days forward in Analysis Notes of the American Astronomical Society.
Many of those moons are rocks just a few miles throughout — small in contrast with our moon, which is 2,159 miles throughout. However so long as they’ve trackable orbits round their guardian physique, the scientists who catalog objects within the photo voltaic system contemplate them to be moons. That’s the duty of the Worldwide Astronomical Union, which ratified the 128 new moons of Saturn on Tuesday.
The forthcoming paper’s lead creator, Edward Ashton of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, can have naming rights for the objects.
“Whoever discovers them will get the correct to call them,” mentioned Dr. Alexandersen, who works with the Worldwide Astronomical Union to substantiate the existence of objects within the photo voltaic system. The present naming scheme for moons on Saturn relies on characters from Norse and different mythology.
“Possibly in some unspecified time in the future they’ll should broaden the naming scheme additional,” Dr. Alexandersen mentioned.
The moons have been found in 2023 utilizing the Canada France Hawaii Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Dr. Ashton and his colleagues noticed patches of house close to Saturn, and over time this allowed them to trace the movement of beforehand unknown moons.
“You want to have the ability to show that the thing is in orbit across the planet,” mentioned Dr. Ashton, who was additionally chargeable for discovering 62 new moons of Saturn two years in the past.
All of the moons are irregular, that means they’re small, orbit at a extremely angled slope relative to Saturn’s equator, and infrequently journey across the planet backward relative to the opposite main moons. Not a lot else will be gleaned about them as a result of they’re simply faint dots of sunshine in telescopic views. However they lengthen from about 6.5 million to just about 18 million miles from the planet. For comparability, the planet’s rings lengthen to simply 175,000 miles, and its main moons — together with Titan and Enceladus — are as much as two million miles away.
The existence of so many moons round Saturn hints at a number of dramatic collisions in house. Dr. Ashton and his workforce imagine that the irregular moons have been captured by Saturn in some unspecified time in the future in its historical past. Some could also be fragments of huge objects that collided elsewhere within the photo voltaic system, whereas others could also be additional fragments of collisions between moons as much as tens of miles in dimension that crashed collectively in Saturn’s orbit.
The workforce has grouped lots of the moons, figuring out potential households which will have come from the identical collisions. “You’re making an attempt to conclude what the great-great-grandparents have been like, 5 generations later,” mentioned Brett Gladman, an creator of the paper on the College of British Columbia.
A very attention-grabbing subgroup is known as Mundilfari, after a deity of Norse mythology, and contains 47 of the 128 new moons. The workforce thinks this subgroup may be the results of a collision inside Saturn’s orbit as latest as 100 million years in the past, which was not so way back on cosmic time scales.
The group’s age could possibly be a window into chaotic exercise within the outer photo voltaic system, which has sometimes been assumed to be extra calm up to now 100 million years.
“That is implying we could possibly be having collisional occasions, and we’re seeing the shrapnel within the inhabitants of tiny moons,” mentioned Michele Bannister, an astronomer on the College of Canterbury in New Zealand, who was not concerned within the paper.
Studying extra about these moons is troublesome contemplating their small dimension, however astronomers may have the ability to examine them with the James Webb Area Telescope, mentioned Heidi Hammel, an astronomer on the Affiliation of Universities for Analysis in Astronomy.
There could also be much more moons round Saturn awaiting discovery, doubtlessly within the hundreds, Dr. Ashton mentioned.
However he might depart these discoveries to others.
“I’m a bit mooned out for the time being,” he mentioned.
News
GOP widens UC antisemitism investigations, hitting UCLA, UC San Francisco medical schools

The UCLA and UC San Francisco medical schools have been given two weeks to submit years of internal documents to a Republican-led congressional committee about alleged antisemitism and how the schools responded, widening the federal government’s far-reaching investigations into the University of California.
The demands from House Education and Workforce Committee Chair Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) cited reports of Jewish people “experiencing hostility and fear” at each campus and that universities had not proved that they “meaningfully responded.”
Walberg’s letters said the committee would be investigating whether the schools violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.
The additional investigation comes as top UC officials and the Justice Department have begun negotiations over allegations that the UCLA campus overall has been hostile to Jewish students, staff and faculty. The federal government has suspended more than $500 million in health, medical and energy research grants from UCLA and is seeking $1 billion and major campus changes before restoring the funds.
The Trump administration cited alleged Title VI violations when pulling the money.
The House committee said Monday it wanted “all documents and communications” since Sept. 1, 2021, tied to complaints of antisemitic incidents at UCLA and UC San Fransisco. A similar letter was also sent to the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
Some UCLA medical school faculty are members of a broader campus organization, the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group, that has aired complaints publicly for months at UC regents meetings about antisemitism.
The group’s chair, medical school assistant clinical professor of psychiatry Kira Stein, is mentioned in the Monday letter to UCLA as a faculty member who has reported anti-Jewish incidents.
“Federal lawmakers, in their letter released today, echoed what many of us have experienced firsthand: Antisemitism at UCLA is common, corrosive, and continues to be met with silence and inaction from the university administration and local leaders,” Stein said in a statement Monday.
The committee has asked for communications with UCLA’s medical school dean, administrators who work on diversity or restorative justice-related programs, and several other positions as well as data on specific events and courses, including one on “structural racism and health equity.”
It also asked for emails from administrators “referring or relating to antisemitism or the terms Jewish, Israel, Israeli, Palestine, or Palestinian.” And it requests information about a January report focused on the medical school that a UCLA task force on anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism prepared.
That 35-page report said “students, residents and faculty in the David Geffen School of Medicine who express support for Palestinian human rights, and who offer any criticism of Israel’s violation of them, face harassment from within and outside the medical school.”
The House committee has asked for “all documents and communications since October 7, 2023 in the possession of the office of the executive vice chancellor” — UCLA Provost Darnell Hunt — related to that task force. Members of the task force have accused UCLA of not taking complaints of bias incidents against Muslims, Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans as seriously as it has reports of antisemitism.
Walberg said that, in addition to Title VI enforcement, he would use the documents to “aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitic discrimination, are needed.”
The UCLA medical school is also under a Department of Health and Human Services investigation over accusations that it “discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national origin in its admissions.” UCLA denied the charges and the department has not formally announced the results of its investigation that began in late March. But when it canceled hundreds of millions in grants to UCLA last month, the Trump administration said the action was due in part to its belief that the university illegally uses race in admissions.
In a Monday statement, a spokesperson for the UCLA medical school said it opposed antisemitism.
“Antisemitism has no place at UCLA’s medical school. Protecting the civil rights of our Jewish community members remains a top priority,” the statement said. “We are committed to fair processes in all our educational programs and activities, consistent with federal and state anti-discrimination laws and continue to take specific steps to foster an environment free of antisemitism and other forms of discrimination and harassment.”
A spokesperson for UC San Francisco did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tense disagreements have erupted at the UCLA medical school between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students, faculty and staff since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing war in Gaza. Each has accused the other of discrimination, doxxing and harassment. Incidents at the school have been cited by two UCLA task forces, one that looked at antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and the other that researched anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism.
News
Abrego Garcia Detained Again After Administration Signaled It Would Re-Deport Him
A judge in Maryland barred the administration from immediately deporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia until he had a chance to challenge the move.
News
Fed Chair Jerome Powell is worried about the job market. Here are 3 red flags for workers.

When Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday opened the door to cutting interest rates for the first time in nearly a year, he noted the tremors beginning to shake a main pillar of the U.S. economy: the labor market.
Concerns about the pace of job growth were heightened earlier this month after government data showed a sharp slowdown in hiring in July, along with much weaker payroll gains in May and June than previously thought. The disappointing numbers were alarming enough for President Trump to question their accuracy and to fire the head of the agency tasked with compiling the data.
Yet labor experts tell CBS News they weren’t surprised by the downturn, and caution that more pain could be in store for job seekers. Data released since the August 1 job numbers shows companies are delaying hiring as they adjust course to account for headwinds including fresh U.S. tariffs and the advent of artificial intelligence, they say.
“There’s a real cooling in the labor market,” Andy Challenger, senior vice president of executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, told CBS MoneyWatch. “We’re also having lots of individual conversations with companies that are letting us know to expect future layoffs.”
He added, “So for me, there is more reason to be pessimistic about the labor market than optimistic we’ll see some major bounce back.”
Here are three charts that could point to a serious downturn in the U.S. job market.
Fewer workers are getting hired
Overall, U.S. employers in 2025 have added fewer jobs on a monthly basis compared with the pace of gains in recent years, when companies sought to expand as the economy roared back from the pandemic. In 2024, employers hired an average of 168,000 workers each month, but that has slowed to an average of 35,000 over the past three months, Powell said on Friday.
The risk is that the labor market could weaken from here, which could lead to “sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment,” Powell said.
The slowdown could spur the Fed to cut its benchmark interest rate, policymakers’ main tool for energizing the economy and job growth, at its meeting next month for the first time since December 2024. Lowering rates could bolster the labor market because it would make it cheaper for consumers to borrow, driving spending, for businesses to invest, including by adding workers.
More long-term job seekers
Another troubling sign is a recent surge in long-term job seekers, or people who have been searching for a job for more than 27 weeks. In July, about 1.8 million Americans had been looking for work for more than 27 weeks, a jump of about 64% from three years earlier and 20% from a year ago.
It may not get easier to find work anytime soon, given signs from employers that they intend to continue to cut jobs, Challenger said.
“Don’t take the summer off” from looking for new work, he advised job-hunters. “It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the labor market will be better in three to six months.”
A jump in unemployed young workers
At the same time, young workers are also having more trouble finding their first jobs, which has been blamed on everything from slowing economic activity this year to employers adopting artificial intelligence in place of entry-level workers.
To be sure, the nation’s unemployment rate remains low, at 4.2%. Yet that statistic is backward-looking, reflecting the labor market’s strength in previous months — it says little about economic conditions moving forward.
Meanwhile, for new college graduates the current job market amounts to “a perfect storm,” said career coach Tracey Newell.
“Companies are limiting new entry-level roles, and AI is replacing many traditional ‘starter’ jobs,” she added, noting that it isn’t unusual for employers these days to receive hundreds of job applications for a single position.
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