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An amateur astronomer discovered a previously unknown moon around Jupiter after looking at old telescope images, a great first.
“I am proud to say that this is the first planetary moon discovered by an amateur astronomer!” moon researcher Kai Ly said in a July 8th Sky and Telescope report which details the discovery.
Jupiter may have tens or even hundreds of undiscovered moons orbiting it. This massive planet has a large gravitational field that allows it to capture space debris in its orbit. Jupiter currently hosts at least 79 moons, and the number continues to grow. The latest discovery was made by Ly, an amateur astronomer, and it is the latest addition to the catalog of the Carmelite group of Jovian satellites.
Carme and his crew are oddly shaped little space rocks. They orbit in the opposite direction of Jupiter’s rotation – a phenomenon called retrograde – and the group moves around Jupiter at an extreme tilt relative to the orbital plane of the giant planet, according to NASA. Carme is the largest of the group, with an average radius of 14 miles (23 kilometers). Carme is the bedrock of the discovery of the amateur astronomer and the 22 other known members of the group. Astronomers believe that Carme was an asteroid captured by the gravity of Jupiter, and that its group are the pieces that broke off from it in a cosmic collision.
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Ly made her discovery by looking online at a 2003 dataset that was collected by researchers at the University of Hawaii using the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Ly paid special attention to images collected in February of that year, when the moons were apparently at their brightest. This was caused by a phenomenon known as opposition, when the sun and a given planet appear in opposite parts of the sky from Earth. Our home planet sat in the middle of a line between the sun and Jupiter in February 2003, allowing astronomers on Earth to clearly see the Jupiter system illuminated by the star.
Ly used observations from another telescope called Subaru to establish the object’s 22-day arc, which showed that the lunar candidate was likely related to Jupiter’s gravity. This baseline also allowed them to find and confirm the existence of the moon with other data sets.
In the article on space and the telescope, Ly described the exciting discovery as “a summer pastime before going back to school”.
This rock is currently designated EJc0061, but does not yet have an official name. When it does, it will likely end with the letter e like Carmel. When NASA officials explained Carme’s nickname, they said “a name ending in” e “was chosen in accordance with International Astronomical Union policy to denote outer moons with retrograde orbits.” .
Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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