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Letter: Spotting Saturn's moons in a childhood hobby

Published 8 July 2026

From Bruce Denness, Niton, Isle of Wight, UK

The distribution of the 100-odd moons in the newly discovered Mundilfari group around Saturn reminds me of the distribution of individual shots on the paper target sheets I used to check my progress when learning to handle a shotgun as a boy on the family farm. I recall that the target sheet was about 30 metres from the gun. The spread of shots tended to be up to about 300 millimetres across, and the diameter of the gun barrel was about 10 mm (13 June, p 34).

Scaling that up to cosmic dimensions, it would seem to suggest the possibility that the Mundilfari group is debris from a distant stellar explosion, gravitationally captured by Saturn as it passed through the solar system.

Issue no. 3603 published 11 July 2026

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