PASADENA, Calif. An international team of astronomers announced Wednesday it has discovered four more moons orbiting Saturn, apparently putting the gas giant back on top of the heap as the planet with the greatest number of known satellites.

The four faint bodies, spotted over the last two months at telescopes scattered across the globe, bring the number of known moons orbiting Saturn to 22. With that, Saturn edges out Uranus, with 21 natural satellites, on the moon front.

The team of astronomers said they know very little about the moons, other than their brightness. Estimates of their size anywhere from 6 to 30 miles (10 to 50 kilometers) across are based on assumptions of their reflectivity.

However, astronomers have been able to determine that the irregular moons meaning they orbit outside the plane of Saturns equator are not asteroids, thanks to orbital calculations done by Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Nor are they likely to be comets.

"The probability of that is very small," said Gladman, of the Observatoire de la Cote dAzur in France. Gladman added that several more months of calculations should allow astronomers to pin down the moons orbits.

The four moons are the only other irregular Saturnian moons found since William Pickering spotted Phoebe in 1898.

"Its nice to go out and find these things, especially since its been more than 100 years," said Philip Nicholson, a Cornell University astronomy professor and team member.

The moons are believed to orbit Saturn at a distance of anywhere from 6 million to 12 million miles (10 million to 20 million kilometers). In contrast, Saturns moon Titan which will be visited by Cassini's Huygens probe in 2004 orbits just 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from the planet.

Unlike Saturns regular moons, which formed from the accretion disk that once surrounded the planet, the newly discovered satellites were likely captured into orbit after the gas giant formed. As such, the "new" moons are actually quite ancient. Indeed, the icy bodies could very well be primitive remnants of the earliest building blocks of the solar system, Gladman said.

For now, the additional moons bear the provisional code names of S/2000 S1, S2, S3 and S4. Following additional observations, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) will certify them as true planetary satellites, and more lyrical names will be given. By astronomical convention, Saturns moons bear the names of Titans and other figures taken from ancient Greek mythology.

Astronomers used the European Southern Observatorys 86.5-inch (2.2-meter) telescope in Chile; Canada-France-Hawaii 138-inch (3.5-meter) telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii; MDM 95-inch (2.4-meter) telescope in Tucson, Arizona; Steward Observatory 59-inch (1.5-meter) telescope, also in Tucson and the ESO New Technology Telescope, also in Chile, to make the discoveries.

Between 1997 and 1999, the same team discovered five more moons orbiting Uranus. While the astronomers caution the new discoveries at Saturn are preliminary, they also said they have discovered other objects that are likely Saturnian moon candidates.

Promising a further bounty, the spacecraft Cassini should reveal even more satellites within Saturns rings after it arrives in orbit around the planet in 2004.