No other planet in our solar system has so many moons, but Saturn is close behind with 83.
The new moons were discovered using telescopes located in Chile and Hawaii in 2021 and 2022. All have been confirmed using follow-up observations. The smallest has a radius of one kilometer and the largest three kilometers according to Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution, who helped discover them.
In April, the European Space Agency, ESA, will send a spacecraft to Jupiter’s vicinity to study the planet and some of the nearby icy moons. Even Nasa is planning a trip to the Milky Way’s largest planet and the moon Europa, which is believed to have an ocean beneath its frozen surface.
The many moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn are believed to be fragments of larger moons that collided with each other.
The largest moon in our solar system is Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter and has a radius of about 2,635 kilometers. The Earth has a radius of 6,375 kilometers.
The newly discovered moons have not yet been named, and according to Sheppard, only half of them are large enough (a radius of about 1.5 kilometers) to be named.
Corrected: In an earlier version there was an incorrect information about the moon Ganymede.
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