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The recent discovery of 12 other satellite bodies around the giant planet leaves the total at 79, the largest number of moons of any planet in our solar system.
The experts were looking for objects outside of our solar system last year when they pointed their telescopes toward the Jupiter environs, said Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Scientific Institute in Washington.
They detected a row of objects lugging near the huge gaseous planet, but they did not know whether they were moons or asteroids.
"This was not a sudden discovery, but it took a year to determine what these objects were," said Sheppard, who led the team that made the discovery. It turned out that they were moons of Jupiter.
Last year, the identity of two of them was confirmed and Tuesday the other ten.
Moons have remained unnoticed for a long time because they are extremely small, with a diameter of one or two kilometers, said Gareth Williams, of the Center of Minor Planets of the Institute astronomical, who thinks that Jupiter has even more of those little moons that have not been discovered.
"We simply have not watched this area enough," said Williams, who helped to confirm the orbits of the moons.
Experts have dubbed one of the "few" moons because of its unusual orbit.
But it is Sheppard's girlfriend who found the official name: Valetudo, the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter.
Valetudo is in the ring furthest away from Jupiter, turning in the opposite direction to the rotation of the planet and against the other moons.
"It's like I'm coming down a street in the opposite direction," Sheppard said.
The hypothesis is that Valetudo and similar moons appeared shortly after the formation of the planet.
Probably in the beginning Jupiter acted like a magnet, drawing all the matter around him.
Part of this material coagulated and remained in rotation, becoming its moons.
"The incredible thing about these moons is that they are waste of the raw material of the planet," added the expert.
To confirm the existence of these satellites, telescopes were used in Chile, Hawaii and Arizona.
Galileo detected the four largest moons of Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto in 1610.
The current total includes eight that have not been seen in recent years.
Among the other planets that have more moons, we find Saturn with 61, Uranus with 27 and Neptune with 14. Mars has two, the Earth has one, Mercury and Venus do not. do not have any.
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