The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

That's not a moon, that's a--wait, no that's a moon

Astronomer Scott Sheppard has discovered 10 more moons orbiting Jupiter, bringing the gas giant's coterie up to 79:

Sheppard found them with the help of a ground-based telescope in Chile that had recently received an upgrade: a camera made for scanning the night sky for very faint objects. Sheppard was looking for Planet Nine, the planet some astronomers believe lurks somewhere at the edge of our solar system, jostling the orbits of other objects in strange ways. As the telescope gazed in the darkness way beyond Pluto, it ended up catching something much closer: a flurry of glinting, tiny objects near Jupiter, the smallest of which was about half a mile wide.

Sheppard couldn’t say whether these points of light were actually moons, at least not right away. To determine whether something is indeed a moon, astronomers must track the object for about a year to determine that, yes, its motions are governed by the gravitational tug of a planet. Sheppard says he couldn’t get excited about his findings in earnest until he observed the objects again a year later, this past spring, and his suspicions were confirmed.

If you came to this story expecting to find dazzling, close-up images of Jupiter’s newly discovered moons, we have some bad news: The era of discovering massive worlds around the gas planet ended more than 400 years ago, with Galileo. Like this latest batch, many of the moons astronomers have discovered around Jupiter in the past several decades have been smaller than cities. Their minuscule size has prompted some astronomers, including Sheppard and Williams, to wonder whether they should even bother giving them names. Williams says that discoverers of moons don’t have to name them if they don’t want to. Sheppard suggests perhaps it’s time to add another layer to our definition of a moon. “The definition of a moon is just anything that orbits a planet, so maybe once you start getting down to a kilometer or so in size, maybe we should start calling these things dwarf moons,” he says.

Now they just have to name all of them...

Comments (1) -

  • David Harper

    7/20/2018 5:45:08 AM +00:00 |

    When I first saw the headline, I assumed that the discovery observations must have been made with the Hubble Space Telescope.  I was surprised to learn that they were actually made using ground-based instruments that included a couple of 4-metre telescopes.  When I was being paid to do astronomy 25 years ago, that would have been one of the biggest telescopes in the world.  Today, a 4-metre telescope is a distinctly mid-range instrument, but with adaptive optics and advanced cameras, astronomers can do things with a 4-metre telescope that would have been unimaginable in the 1990s.

Comments are closed