Castle News:
Astronomers discovered 12 new moons around Jupiter, which brings the total number of moons of the gas giant to 92, breaking records in the solar system.
With this discovery, Saturn retreats from the top of this ranking to the second place, with 83 confirmed moons.
Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, who is part of the team tracking the moons, told The Associated Press on Friday that Jupiter’s moons were recently added to a list maintained by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
The new moons were discovered using telescopes in Hawaii and Chile in 2021 and 2022, but scientists needed to follow their entire orbits in order to make the discovery official.
“It is my hope that we will be able to image one of these exomoons up close in the near future to better determine their origins,” Sheppard added in an email on Friday.
He noted that only half of these new moons are large enough (1.6 km) to deserve names.
And the scientist continued in a previous interview with the Sky and Telescope website that three moons moving in a progressive direction – such as the planet’s rotation – were particularly difficult to detect. He explained that this is because it is closer to Jupiter and the light scattered from the planet is massive.
Sheppard, who discovered a large number of moons around Saturn a few years ago and participated in 70 moon discoveries so far around Jupiter, expects both Jupiter and Saturn to continue to discover more moons depending on future technologies and missions.
According to Sheppard, it is believed that the large number of small moons around both Jupiter and Saturn are parts of larger moons that collided with each other or collided with comets or asteroids.
The same applies to Uranus and Neptune, but they are so far away that the moons are more difficult to spot.
Jupiter and Saturn greatly outnumber the remaining planets in our system when it comes to the number of natural satellites.
Uranus revolves around 27 confirmed moons, Neptune has 14 moons, while Mars has two moons and Earth one. Venus and Mercury have no moons.
It is worth noting that the European Space Agency sent a spacecraft last April to Jupiter to study the planet and some of its largest icy moons. Next year, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is believed to harbor an ocean beneath its frozen crust.
Source: RT
