CHILI – Jupiter now has a new nickname. As well as being the King of the Planets–due to its largest size–in our solar system, this gas planet now also has the most famous moons.
Astronomers have observed an additional 12 moons orbiting Jupiter, bringing its total number of confirmed moons to 92.
Quoting CNN, the discovery was made during observations by astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science and his team.
They used the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii in September 2021 and the Dark Energy Camera placed on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile in August 2022.
The Dark Energy camera can survey the sky for dim objects.
Jupiter and its natural satellites align with more distant targets Sheppard and his team have been looking for in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects surrounding the sun that lies past Neptune’s orbit at the edge of the solar system.
“We have been surveying new moons around Jupiter by chance, while our primary survey is looking for planets in the outer solar system beyond Pluto,” said Sheppard.
The team was able to tell the difference between Jupiter and objects around it from those of the distant solar system because any object around Jupiter would move at the same speed as the gas giant.
Distant solar system objects cannot move as fast as objects moving with Jupiter.
Follow-up observations for the new 12 moons took about a year to confirm, and the team used the Magellan Telescope in Chile to do the work.
Neither moon has a name since its discovery was recently announced, but the Minor Planet Center will assign each month a number in the coming months.
The Minor Planet Center tracks the positions of minor planets, comets and space rocks. Under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union, the organization is responsible for the identification, designation, and data on the orbits of these celestial bodies.
“The International Astronomical Union allows the naming of any moon larger than about 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers), which half of these new discoveries are larger than that, so they get names,” said Sheppard.
New moon search
Because Jupiter is a bright planet, astronomers have to deal with the problems of glare and scattered light that affect the space where the moon can be.
Technology makes it easier to observe Jupiter and the areas around it in greater detail.
Sheppard and his team are in the process of tracking “many more moons around Jupiter,” but they need more observations to confirm and announce their findings.
Finding additional moons around Jupiter and determining their orbits could help identify targets for future missions.
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, launched in April, and NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, expected to launch in 2024, will visit Jupiter and several of its moons this decade.
The missions may be able to pass the newly discovered moon on their way.
“These outer moons can only be visited by this spacecraft when they enter Jupiter’s gravitational sphere of influence,” said Sheppard.
“The hope is if we find enough [banyak]one of which will happen to be near the spacecraft’s trajectory to get a close-up shot.
“These outer moons are important to understand because they are the last remnants of the population of bodies that formed in the giant planet region when remnants of material coalesced into the planets.”
The giant planet region is where the largest planets in our solar system can be found, and now there are no objects there because the planet devoured all matter in the process of its formation.
Sheppard and his team believe these moons are the remnants of at least seven larger moons that broke apart when they collided with another moon, asteroid or comet.
The breaking of these moons led to the creation of hundreds of smaller moons, said Sheppard.
Moons are remnants of what was born in the disk of gas and dust around Jupiter after the planet formed and then captured and pulled most of the material into its orbit.
These planetary building blocks could provide a window into the early years of the solar system.
Sheppard’s team has the expertise to find moons around the giant planets in our solar system.
“In total, we have been part of 70 moon discoveries around Jupiter,” he said in an email to CNN.
“For other planets, there were 43 discoveries on Saturn, 2 on Uranus, and 1 on Neptune.”
In full, Saturn now has 83 moons, Uranus has 27, and Neptune has 14.
His team has also tracked many additional moons around Saturn, but they are more difficult to find because the ringed planet is farther from Earth.
“We believe Uranus and Neptune also have many small moons, but the planets are much farther away, making it more difficult to detect small moons around them,” said Sheppard.
Source: CNN
