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Twelve new moons were discovered around Jupiter, bringing to 79 its total number of known satellites, a record among the planets of our solar system, an American team of astronomers announced on Tuesday.
Researcher Scott Sheppard , of the Carnegie Institution for Science, called one of these new moons a "strange ball" because of its small size: just under a kilometer in diameter, making it "probably" the smallest satellite of Jupiter.
Its orbit is also "different from that of all other known Jupiterian moons," said the astronomer.
"This is an unstable situation"
about a year and a half to this "strange ball" to circle Jupiter, whose inclined orbit intersects those of a cloud of other moons moving in the opposite direction of the rotation of Jupiter.
"This is an unstable situation", a commented Mr. Sheppard. "Frontal collisions can quickly dislocate satellites and reduce them to dust."
The "strange ball", like two recently discovered moons, turns in the same direction as Jupiter.
Fragments from collisions
It takes about a year for the nearest satellites to circle the planet, versus two years for the more distant ones.
All these moons could be fragments from collisions between larger cosmic bodies. Astronomers have proposed to name "Valetudo" the "strange ball", named after the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter, goddess of health and hygiene.
The Italian astronomer Galileo discovered from 1610 the first four moons of Jupiter.
One year to confirm the trajectory of their orbits
The team of astronomers behind the recent discovery was not looking for new satellites of Jupiter, but these the last appeared in the field of their telescope as they searched for planets beyond Pluto.
The new moons were observed for the first time in 2017 from the perspective of a telescope based in Chile and exploited by the National Astronomical Observatory of the United States
It took a year to confirm the trajectory of their orbits with several other telescopes in the United States and Chile.
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