Astronomers discover twelve more Jupiter moons
In reviewing ground-based data from 2021 and 2022, astronomers have discovered another twelve Jupiter moons, bringing that planet’s total moon population to 92.
All of the newly discovered moons are small and far out, taking more than 340 days to orbit Jupiter. Nine of the 12 are among the 71 outermost Jovian moons, whose orbits are more than 550 days. Jupiter probably captured these moons, as evidenced by their retrograde orbits, opposite in direction to the inner moons. Only five of all the retrograde moons are larger than 8 kilometers (5 miles); Sheppard says the smaller moons probably formed when collisions fragmented larger objects.
One newly discovered moon, dubbed Valetudo, is about 3,000 feet across and orbits in a retrograde orbit that crosses the orbits of several other moons that orbit in the opposite direction. As the article notes, “This highly unstable situation is likely to lead to head-on collisions that would shatter one or both objects.”
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In reviewing ground-based data from 2021 and 2022, astronomers have discovered another twelve Jupiter moons, bringing that planet’s total moon population to 92.
All of the newly discovered moons are small and far out, taking more than 340 days to orbit Jupiter. Nine of the 12 are among the 71 outermost Jovian moons, whose orbits are more than 550 days. Jupiter probably captured these moons, as evidenced by their retrograde orbits, opposite in direction to the inner moons. Only five of all the retrograde moons are larger than 8 kilometers (5 miles); Sheppard says the smaller moons probably formed when collisions fragmented larger objects.
One newly discovered moon, dubbed Valetudo, is about 3,000 feet across and orbits in a retrograde orbit that crosses the orbits of several other moons that orbit in the opposite direction. As the article notes, “This highly unstable situation is likely to lead to head-on collisions that would shatter one or both objects.”
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
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Either that or a near-miss will eject it from the system.
Just imagine the exploration of the Jupiter system that would be possible with a nuclear-powered Starship. It could be based in orbit around Mars, and make years-long surveying trips into the realm of Jupiter’s moons.
I suspect with nuclear power, the amount of (mono)propellant that would suffice would mean that much of the volume of a Starship could be devoted to living space and supplies to make multi-year voyages feasible, like the sailing ships of old!
I shall call them the ‘dirty dozen’.
Valetudo must be a recent capture; I find hard to believe that something almost a kilometer wide could have been missed by Galileo and others.
David Ross: You clearly don’t understand the sheer scale of space. It’s actually quite impressive that we can identify an object that small at that distance with our current best telescopes. Even with our current optics, nobody has actually “seen” these moons, they are simply too dark and too small to be identified by the human eye. They are detected by having a computer compare literally thousands of separate images taken at different times by different instruments. Even the Hubble only has a resolution of 0.014 arc seconds, which means that at the distance of the Moon, Hubble can resolve to about 27 meters. I don’t have my math text handy to remind me how to calculate an arc second at the distance of Jupiter, but it’s FAR above 1 kilometer. Galileo’s little 20x telescope couldn’t even dream of showing something that small.
“Hubble only has a resolution of 0.014 arc seconds”
WFC3, the current primary visible-light camera, has a pixel scale of about 0.04 arcsec. The corresponding length at Jupiter is about 150 km.