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A team of astronomers looking for a planet beyond the orbit of Pluto had a surprise in discovering new moons around Jupiter. Twelve, to be exact.
The moons are small, ranging from one kilometer to three kilometers in width. He now brings to 79 the number of Moon of Jupiter, the highest number of all the planets in our solar system
"The 12 discovery is quite surprising," said Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The researchers were looking for the proposed "Planet X" or "Planet 9" that astronomers believe to exist and could explain how far objects orbit in the same way.
Four-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American in Chile – which was recently equipped with a new, highly sensitive instrument called "Dark Energy Camera", which is about the size of a small car – they detected objects that seemed to be moving against the background stars.
But that did not necessarily suggest that they were moons – they could have been asteroids orbiting the sun. The researchers had to continue their observations
These are images of one of the new moons, named Valetudo. The moon can be seen moving from the stable background of distant stars. Jupiter is not in the frame, but in the upper left (Carnegie Institute for Science)
In May 2018, more than a year after the initial observations, they confirmed that the objects were in orbit around Jupiter. Sun. Several other telescopes have also confirmed these observations.
The "curious"
Jupiter has several types of moons. The Galilean moons – Ganymede, Io, Callisto and Europa – are the largest and can be seen from the Earth with binoculars. There are also small inner moons that turn in the same direction as Jupiter, which is called prograde moons.
There are also external prograde moons.
Finally, there are retrograde moons. These moons are orbiting Jupiter in the opposite direction.
The researchers confirmed two new moons among the inner prograde moons. Nine others were detected as part of the outer retrograde moons. But there was one more, a moon that researchers call the "eccentric" group.
This moon, currently called Valetudo, moves in a progressive movement, although it is slightly inclined relative to the orbits of the other moons. Because it is slanted, it so often crosses retrograde moons
This illustration shows the newly discovered moons of Jupiter and their orbits (Carnegie Institution of Science)
the highway in the wrong direction, "said Sheppard." And it's very bad, because front-end collisions are likely to happen. "
The good news is that a collision is not likely The research team is currently running models to determine how long it will take for this to happen.
"In the course of a human life, this will not happen. Does not happen, but during the solar system's age, one hundred million or billions of years, It seems very likely that Valetudo will run into one of these retrograde objects ", has said Sheppard.
Interestingly, astronomers believe that's what happened in the past
They theorize that Valetudo was a larger object, probably tens of kilometers in diameter. He moved in prograde motion with Jupiter and then collided with another object, causing the smaller moons to retrograde motion.
The results are another piece of the puzzle of the formation of our solar system. Understanding that smaller moons still exist in the outer regions of Jupiter's orbital regions suggests to astronomers that they formed after the planets.
If they had formed earlier, the influence of gas and dust would have created a drag and spiraled them toward the planet, lost forever.
The survey searched for objects one kilometer and up, so there is a chance that there are other smaller "moonlets" orbiting the giant Jupiter
"The question is, is there more Valetudos, strange objects have these different orbits," Sheppard said. "It's unknown, but there are surely smaller fragments."
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