The largest planet in the Solar System is now officially the one with the most satellites, or rather, Jupiter’s moons have increased even more, with a dozen new satellites confirmed to be orbiting the planet. Jupiter’s new moons are 12 and until recently were unknown, but now carry the total count of the gas giant at 92surpassing the impressive stock of Saturn of 83 orbiting bodies.
In reality, both planets are likely to be accompanied by even more moons, but spotting these miniature celestial bodies presents a considerable challenge for astronomers.
Those that are small enough to have escaped detection thus far can probably only be seen using extremely powerful telescopes that don’t have a field of view large enough to encompass the entire Jovian system, while the extreme glare emitted by Jupiter only complicates the whole.
Indifferent to these difficulties, Dr Scott Sheppard it has spent the last two years tracking the orbits of the 12 new moons, which have now been published by the Minor Planet Center (MPC); among other things, the scholar is responsible for the discovery of a previous batch of Jovian moons, the study of which was published in 2018.
What we know about Jupiter’s 12 new moons
Of Jupiter’s dozen new moons, nine are found among the distant clusters of satellites that orbit Jupiter in a retrograde direction, which means they circle the planet in the opposite direction from the inner moons; small in size, these back-tracking objects they all take at least 550 days to complete one orbit.
The remaining three moons of Jupiter have been discovered within groups of prograde satellites which lie between nearby large Galilean moons and distant retrograde objects. Two are located in the Himalia group, which orbits Jupiter at a distance of between 11 and 12 million kilometers (6.8 to 7.5 million miles), while the other belongs to the Carpo group, located about 17 million kilometers (10.6 million miles) from the planet.
All 12 of Jupiter’s new “accessories” take more than 340 days to complete an orbit and are too small to warrant an official name, in fact these mini moons are thought to be the leftovers of much larger satellites that shattered millions of years ago after colliding with another object.
While astronomers can’t tell exactly what crashed into these ancient moons, Sheppard’s 2018 findings contained a clue in the shape of an unusual moon called Valetudo. Bucking the Jovian trend, Valetudo travels prograde despite the fact that its orbit crosses those of distant retrograde moons.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that swimming upstream increases your chances of bumping into someone, and some astronomers therefore speculate that Valetudo may be the remnants of a larger object that once tore through Jupiter’s retrograde moon clusters like a wrecking ball.
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