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Low density, recent surfaces, and somewhat oblong shapes all hint that some of these moons are likely to be less than 100 million years old.

Researchers suspected that the moons might have originated through some sort of interactions within the A Ring, but the number of bodies involved made modeling the system too computationally challenging. Fortunately, Moore's Law caught up with Cassini, and today's issue of Nature contains a paper that describes a model that successfully reproduces the pattern of moons we now observe.

dust, most likely from another of Saturn’s moons, falls on the leading side of Iapetus as it orbits the planet