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Astronomers are still finding moons in Jupiter, 400 years after Galileo used his telescope to spot the first.
Jupiter. NASA
The latest discovery of a dozen small moons brings the total to 79, the largest planet in our solar system
Scientists were looking for objects on the sidelines of the solar system last year when they pointed their telescopes. According to Scott Sheppard of Washington's Carnegie Institute for Science
they saw a new group of objects moving around the giant gaseous planet, but did not know whether they were moons or asteroids pbading by of Jupiter. 19659005] "There was no eureka moment," said Sheppard, who led the team of astronomers. "It took a year to understand what these objects were."
They turned out to be moons of Jupiter. The confirmation of 10 was announced Tuesday. Two were confirmed earlier.
The moons had not been spotted before because they are tiny. They are about one to two kilometers long, said astronomer Gareth Williams of the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union.
And he thinks that Jupiter could have even more moons just as small to wait.
"said Williams, who helped confirm the orbits of the moons.
The team calls one of the new moons an "eccentric ball" because of its unusual orbit. Sheppard's girlfriend gave him a name: Valetudo, the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter.
Valetudo is in the distant and distant swarm of Jupiter's moons that turns in the opposite direction of the planet's rotation. Yet it turns in the same direction as the planet, against the circulation of the swarm.
"This moon is coming down the road in the wrong direction," says Sheppard.
Scientists believe that moons like Valetudo and his siblings appear shortly after Jupiter formed. The planet had to act like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the material that surrounded it. Some of these debris were captured as moons
"What amazes me about these moons, is that they are the remnants of what the planet has formed," was -he says.
Telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and Arizona
Galileo detected the four largest moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto in 1610. The last count of 79 known planets counts eight that did not have not been seen for several years. Saturn is next with 61, followed by Uranus with 27, and Neptune with 14.
Mars has two, the Earth has one, and Mercury and Venus have none.
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