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NASA / Johns Hopkins University
With the new moons discovered, the number of known Jupiter satellites is 79, the largest of the planets in the solar system. In the picture you see Jupiter and the volcanic moon Io.
400 years after Galileo observed the largest moons of Jupiter, astronomers in the United States discovered 12 more satellites of the largest planet in the solar system.
And one of these new moons is a "strange ball" that moves in the opposite direction to other Jupiter satellites, in a "suicide trajectory."
The discovery brings the number of known moons of Jupiter at 79 the largest number of satellites around a planet of the solar system
Telescope at Cerro Tololo
The new satellites were detected in March 2017 by a team led by the Astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Institution for Science, in Washington .
Copyright of the author [19659003] NOAO
The moons were discovered through observations at the Víctor Blanco telescope in Cerro Tololo, Chile.
The moons were discovered with the telescope Víctor M. Blanco, in Cerro Tololo, Chile, which was updated with a new camera of 570 megapixels in 2012
The camera, DECam, allows to observe very few bright objects in the space. (Cell phones, in comparison, have about 12 megapixels.)
Sheppard saw moons for the first time looking for the elusive planet 9, which is believed to exist beyond Pluto.
"Jupiter was simply in the sky near the fields where we were looking for very distant Solar System objects," says the astronomer.
But it was not until about a year to confirm that it was new moons
The arduous process of confirmation of a Moon
To say that a point luminous is a moon it is necessary to study its trajectory during at least one year .
In this way, it will be possible to confirm that the movement of the satellite is determined by the gravitational attraction of a planet.
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Carnegie Institution for Science
Yellow lines indicate where Valetudo is, the ro "between moons of Jupiter.
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Carnegie Institute for Science
The presence of Valetudo was confirmed by other telescopes such as the Magellan telescope at Las Campanas Obsevatorio in Chile, which is operated by the Carnegie Institute and with which these images were captured.
The Minor Planet Center Minor Planet Center, which operates at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Massachusetts, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union, is the only one of its kind. organization that confirms this type of discovery in the Solar System
And the center pointed out that what Sheppard had observed were actually new moons of Jupiter.
"Several observations are needed to confirm that an object is in orbit around Jupiter," said Gareth Williams of the Center for Minor Planets.
Williams used the observations of the team to calculate the orbits. newly discovered moons.
"Retrograde" moons
Nine of the moons discovered in orbit in " retrograde direction ", that is to say in front of the rotation of Jupiter.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech
Cloudy Clouds on Jupiter in an Image of the Published Juno Probe this year.
It is believed that these retrograde moons are the remains of larger bodies that have suffered collisions with asteroids, comets, or other moons.
Retrograde moons discovered take about two years to orbit around Jupiter
Two other moons are in orbit in the overhang, or in the same direction as the rotation of the planet, and take less than a year to get around it, but they are too far to collide with the retrograde.
The "weirdo"
The last discovered moon " is a lunatic and has an orbit like no other known Jovian moon ," explained Sheppard in a press release
Rights 39, author of the image
Roberto Molar Carnegie Institute for Science
This illustration of the Carnegie Institution for Science shows Valetudo, in green, in an orbit contrary to that of the retrograde moons, in red.
It is likely that the smallest known moon of Jupiter has less than one kilometer in diameter . "
This moon takes about a year and a half to travel around Jupiter and its orbits intersect in
The small" strange ball "could collide head-on with other satellites of Jupiter.
"It's an unstable situation. Frontal collisions … would reduce objects to dust, "said Sheppard.
Goddess of Hygiene
Sheppard proposed to call the new" weirdo " Valetudo the name of the Roman goddess of health and hygiene, great-granddaughter of the god Jupiter The US press pointed out that the name had been chosen by Sheppard in tribute to his girlfriend obsessed with the & J J J She She She She She She Hygiene that "showered several times a day"
"I think Valetudo was probably a much larger moon, which has already had other collisions with moons in the opposite direction," said Sheppard. 19659056] "It's as if Valetudo was driving on the wrong side of the road.
Tracks on the Solar System
Reidar Hahn, 1965, explained that the influence of complex influences that shaped the orbital history of a moon could reveal clues on the beginnings of the solar system F ermilab
DECam, the camera mounted on the Víctor Blanco telescope, has 570 pixels and allows you to observe very dark objects.
The discovery that small moons in different orbital groups are still abundant suggests that the collisions that created them occurred after the era of planetary formation.
In this phase, the Sun was still surrounded by a rotating disk of
Because of its size, between one and three kilometers, the new moons are more influenced by gas and dust surrounding areas .
The Carnegie Institution because Science pointed out that if these materials had been present when the first moons of Jupiter would have collided to form the current moons, the drag exerted by the gas and the dust would have been enough for the small moons head for Jupiter.
The existence of moons shows that probably were formed after this gas and dust dissipated .
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