REAL LIFE NEWS: JUPITER HAS 12 NEW MOONS
by Hazed
Jupiter has a lot of moons – and it’s just had 12 new ones added to the list. This doesn’t mean the moons have suddenly been created, it’s just that we’ve only spotted them recently.
They were found by astronomers who were searching for a possible ninth planet that theory says could be lurking far beyond Neptune’s orbit. The team first identified the new moons in March 2017, but needed to confirm that the bodies were in fact locked in orbit around Jupiter rather than just travelling past it.
Nine of the newly-discovered moons belong to an outer group that orbit the planet in the opposite direction to the planet’s spin. These are thought to be the remnants of larger parent bodies that collided with asteroids, comets and other moons, and broke apart. They take about two years to circle the planet.
Two more are in a group circling close to the planet, orbiting in the same direction as Jupiter’s spin. They take nearly a year to complete their orbit, and are thought to be pieces of a once larger moon that was broken up in orbit.
The twelfth new moon is a strange one – the astronomers have described it as an “oddball”. Its orbit means it crosses the path of other moons, and eventually it will probably collide with one of them. How soon? Well, as astronomer explains that, “Collisions don’t happen all that frequently, every billion years or so. If one did happen, we would be able to detect it from Earth, but it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.”
The addition of the 12 moons brings the total to 79. But I don’t have any plans to add new Jovian moons to Fed DataSpace – there’s not enough room on the space map.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/17/astronomers-discover-12-new-moons-orbiting-jupiter
