[ad_1]
Madrid –
A little over four centuries after the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei discovered the first four moons of Jupiter, a team of American astronomers today announced the discovery of twelve other satellites surrounding the largest planet of the solar system. With the new additions, Jupiter happens to have 79 known moons more than any other planet in our neighborhood, reports portal elpais.com
"We used a better camera than any other employee before. This allowed us to get deeper images and to find smaller moons, "says astronomer Scott Sheppard, chief discovery officer.The new satellites measure less than three kilometers each and are very weak. Two of them are more interior and rotate in the same direction as Jupiter's rotation.
Nine others are outside and move in the opposite direction. And the twelfth, less than one kilometer, mixes the two types, with an orbit never seen in Jovian satellites.Feed in the direction of the inner moons, but at the level of the outside, like a suicide bomber.According to the astronomer, this situation unstable p could end in a frontal collision that "would reduce the objects to dust". . According to him, this lost ball of space could be formed precisely after a shock of this kind. The authors of the discovery proposed to baptize this particular satellite with the name of Valetudo, as great-granddaughter of the god Jupiter according to Roman mythology.
Several Satellites
A satellite is simply an opaque celestial body that revolves around a planet. Mercury and Venus have none and the Earth has only the moon, but satellites abound in the rest of the solar system: Mars has two; Pluto, five; Neptune, 14 years old; Uranus, 27 years old; and Saturn, 62. Jupiter, a huge ball of gas with more than a thousand times the mbad of the Earth, is so large that it controls a multitude of objects by its gravity. The largest moon on the planet, Ganymede, is larger than Mercury.
"It can not be ruled out that in the future other objects like these will be discovered around Jupiter or other giant planets, since during the evolution of the external solar system Many collisions have destroyed larger moons and debris has appeared in orbit around these small objects, "says planetologist Olga Prieto, of the Astrobiology Center of Madrid:" The Uranus system is an example of results that cause collisions: the whole system is lying, rotating perpendicular to its orbit around the Sun, and some of its satellites, like Miranda, seem newly formed from pieces of previous objects. "
" Probably , there are many more Jupiter moons that can be detected in the future, with better telescopes and dedicated astronomers, "agrees Scott Bolton, senior researcher at Juno, NASA's probe orbiting Jupiter . since 2016. "These moons were hard to detect because of their distance from Jupiter and their size, so the astronomers who discovered them deserve great recognition for their excellent work," adds Bolton, who says not involved in the discovery. 19659002] The Sheppard team detected the new moons almost by accident, when researchers searched for planets beyond Pluto, in the confines of the solar system . Jupiter then pbaded in front of his lens. The first observations were made in the spring of 2017 from the Inter-American Observatory of Cerro Tololo (Chile), the same who discovered 70% of the universe.
Read also : The planet Jupiter is not so boring as the researchers thought
"Despite what you see in the movies, the solar system is very large and almost empty, " stresses astronomer Steve Heathcote, director of the Chilean Observatory. "These new satellites are small – Valetudo is less than a kilometer – and they are very far away, so they are barely visible.You have to look in the right direction, with a very sensitive camera, to find them" he adds. Scott Sheppard's team used the new Dark Energy Chamber installed in the Cerro Tololo White Telescope. It's a device capable of taking 520-megapixel images of resolution from a square of the sky with a side equivalent to about four times the apparent diameter of the moon, according to Heathcore details. "This allows you to inspect a large area of space with great sensitivity."
"We only see the tip of a very large iceberg," says the director of the Chilean Observatory. "It is believed that some of Jupiter's original satellites were divided into several small pieces.It is likely that there are many fragments of the size of Valetudo or smaller that have not yet been discovered", he says: "The demarcation line between fragments worthy of being baptized, with the name of a Roman goddess, and the rest of the anonymous rocks is, in a way, a matter of taste", he said elpais.com . (I)
[ad_2]
Source link
