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The giant planet of our solar system has hidden something – or 12 things, really.
The researchers announced Monday that they had discovered a dozen new moons around Jupiter, including a tiny one that they call a "weird" one. Due to the orbit of this small moon, it may ultimately be intended for an accident.
The discovery brings the total number of known Jovian moons to 79.
But what is particularly crazy with these newly discovered moons, is that the researchers did not even look for them.
The team who discovered the moons was looking for a hypothetical massive planet that could exist on the periphery of our solar system, often called Planet Nine or Planet X. The work was led by Scott Sheppard, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science who studies small bodies in the solar system and the formation of planets and stars.
But the researchers realized that Jupiter was in a place that allowed them to examine the area around the gaseous giant for unknown natural satellites. "Jupiter was right in the sky near the search fields where we were looking for extremely distant Solar System objects, so we were able to search for new moons around Jupiter while searching for planets at the margins of our solar system. ", said Sheppard in a statement.
The Carnegie Institution for Science
The Many Moons of Jupiter
The team was using the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the Inter-American Observatory at Cerro Tololo in Chile, recently updated with the Dark Energy Camera. This makes it a powerful tool for monitoring the night sky in search of weak objects.
They first spotted the 12 new moons in the spring of 2017, but they had to make several more observations before they could confirm that the moons were actually orbiting around Jupiter, according to Gareth Williams of the Planet Minor Minor Center. 39, International Astronomical Union.
"So the whole process took a year," said Williams, who calculated the orbits of the new moons, in a statement.
With 67 other known moons flying around Jupiter, there is already good circulation around the gas planet, as shown in the illustration above.
Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, is the ninth largest object in the solar system, larger than the planet Mercury and dwarf planets like Pluto. But the newly discovered moons are tiny, ranging from 1 to 3 kilometers in diameter.
Two of the new moons are part of the prograde group, a group of moons that are relatively close to Jupiter and run in the same direction as the planet. Astronomers believe that these moons could originally be part of a larger moon that broke, according to Carnegie's statement.
The Carnegie Institution for Science
Nine of the new moons are in the retrograde group, a group of distant moons that turn in the opposite direction of Juipter. This swarm may have been originally three separate moons that separated after collisions.
Then there is the odd
Sheppard said that the weird moon is "probably the smallest known moon of Jupiter, having less than 1 kilometer in diameter".
The team proposed to christen this tiny moon Valetudo, according to the goddess of health and hygiene. In mythology, she was the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter.
The moon moves in the same direction as the prograde moons, but is as far from Jupiter as the retrograde moons traveling in the opposite direction. This means that a frontal collision could occur.
"Our other discovery is a real eccentric ball and has an orbit like no other known Jovian moon," Sheppard said.
Valetudo might be the last fragment of a larger moon that has been destroyed by retrograde moons, and its path means that it could also be demolished.
"It's an unstable situation," Sheppard said.
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