[ad_1]
Twelve new moons were discovered around Jupiter, bringing to 79 the total number of its known satellites, a record among the planets of our solar system, said Tuesday an American team of astronomers. Researcher Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science has called one of these new moons a "strange ball" because of its small size: just under one 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.
It takes about a year and a half to this "strange ball" to circumnavigate Jupiter, whose inclined orbit intersects those of a cloud of other moons moving in the opposite direction of the rotation of Jupiter. "It's an unstable situation," Scott Sheppard commented. "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. It takes about a year for the nearest satellites to circle the planet, compared to two years for those more distant. All these moons could be fragments from collisions between larger cosmic bodies.
Read also Who would have thought? Ten amazing information about planets and stars
"Valetudo"
Astronomers have proposed to call "Valetudo" the "strange ball", named after the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter, goddess of health and hygiene. The Italian astronomer Galileo discovered the first four moons of Jupiter in 1610.
The team of astronomers behind the recent discovery was not looking for new satellites of Jupiter, but these are 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 for a Chile-based telescope operated by the US National Astronomical Observatory. It took a year to confirm the trajectory of their orbits with several other telescopes in the United States and Chile.
See also
Exploring Jupiter, it's up to you
Source link
