There are many moons in the solar system. While the best known one is, of course, our own moon, most planets have at least one, and many have far more than that. The Gaia mission from the European Space Agency, however, has found that there may be more moons than we expected.

A lot more.

The mission identified moons orbiting about 350 asteroids within the solar system, which were previously unknown to us.

While calling them a moon might be a bit of a stretch, these binary asteroids are surprisingly common. Two rocks in space that are orbiting a common point around each other. Some scientists believe that monitoring this type of activity could provide valuable insights into how the solar system evolved over billions of years.

A new study was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics reports about the new findings. The lead author and Observatorie de la Cote d’Azur, Luana Liberato put out a statement, saying:

“Binary asteroids are difficult to find as they are mostly so small and far away from us. Despite us expecting just under one-sixth of asteroids to have a companion, so far we have only found 500 of the million known asteroids to be in binary systems. But this discovery shows that there are many asteroid moons out there just waiting to be found.”

The European Space Agency is planning another mission to gather more information on this. The Hera mission is set to visit Didymos and the moon Dimorphos in the future. These areas have the potential to have lots of binary asteroids that could be studied.

Sounds like there are more moons than we know what to do with.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.