Discovery of Tarqeq

Tarqeq is a small moon of Saturn, only about seven kilometres across, and a member of the Inuit group of irregular satellites. It moves on a distant, tilted and elongated orbit, in the same direction as Saturn spins, and takes almost two years to go round. It was identified by a team of astronomers led by Scott Sheppard from images taken with large ground-based telescopes in the mid-2000s, as part of a search for faint outer moons of the giant planets. Moons of the Inuit group are thought to be the broken remains of a larger body that was captured by Saturn. It is named after Tarqeq, the moon god of Inuit mythology.

Open on the timeline