12 NEW MOONS Discovered

TOPICS:DiscoveredJupiterMoonNEW MOONSNorway Today
Image made available by NASA shows the planet Jupiter. A team of astronomers is reporting the recent discovery of a dozen new moons circling the giant gas planet. That brings the number of moons at Jupiter to 79, the most of any planet. The astronomers were looking for objects on the fringes of the solar system when they spotted the Jupiter moons. They found a dozen small moons. The confirmation of 10 was announced Tuesday, July 17, 2018; two were confirmed earlier. They’re calling one moon an ‘oddball’ because of its unusual orbit. (NASA, ESA, and A. Simon (GSFC) via AP, File)

Posted By: Bill W. Williams 18. July 2018

Using arrays of telescopes positioned worldwide, a team of astronomers has discovered 12 new moons around the solar system’s largest planet; Jupiter.

 

With these newest discoveries, the number of moons revolving about the giant planet now totals 79, some tiny and some massive. Interestingly, one of the newest moons discovered seems to be on a collision course to destruction.

SEARCHING THE UNKNOWN
Tuesday, July 17th, the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center,the official organization charged with collecting data relating to minor planets,asteroids & comets, released the orbital data of the 12 newly discovered moons.

Scott Sheppard, scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington,D.C., gave comment upon the discovery of the new moons, saying “We were looking for new possible planets & dwarf planets within our solar system, just seeing what was out there.” –

BEYOND PLUTO
“We were able to go a little bit farther than anyone’s been able to go in the past and that’s why we were able to find these new Jovian moons. By looking at these outer moons, we can get an insight into what the objects were like that ended up forming the planets we see today,” said Sheppard.

Carnegie’s Sheppard did not set out to find moons around Jupiter. Instead, his team at Carnegie, along with astronomers at the University of Hawaii & Northern Arizona University were looking beyond Pluto for unknown objects when the new moons of Jupiter were discovered.

The researchers say that these moons weren’t discovered earlier due to their small size, with the largest of the new discoveries no larger than 3.2 kilometers diameter.

COLLISION PATH
One moon detected by Sheppard and his colleagues is the smallest Jovian moon ever discovered. They named this moon Valetudo, after the mythological daughter of Jupiter.

This tiny, new moon Valetudo has a ‘twist’ or anomaly. It has a prograde orbit while travelling within the path of many moons with retrograde orbits, and data suggests that these various moon-orbits intersect.

Thus, Jupiter’s future may offer chances to see moon-against-moon collisions.

The planet Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun, with a mass measuring two and a half times the mass of all the planets in the solar system combined.

The largest Galilean moon, Ganymede, is larger than the planet Mercury.

 

© NTB scanpix / #Norway Today

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