A team of astronomers who have carefully studied archival data from 2010 from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope maintain that Jupiter not only has the 79 moons that have been detected so far, but many more: at least 600 irregular moons more than a kilometer in diameter.
That telescope has a powerful digital camera called MegaCam. It is a 340-megapixel wide-field imager that sees in optical and near-infrared. The authors will present their findings at the Virtual Europlanet 2020 Scientific Congress.
jovian moons
But what is the difference between regular and regular moons? If regular moons are formed by the accumulation of material in a disk (like planets) The irregular ones are objects captured by the planet's gravity, which on Jupiter is nothing to sneeze at.
That is, unlike Jupiter's largest moons, such as Io, Europa and Ganymede, these irregular moons were not formed by accumulating material in a disk.
Its capture may have been due to "gas entrainment, falling due to sudden mass growth, and three-body interactions."
The team of astronomers found 52 objects in their images that they identified as irregular moons, and then they estimated the figure of 600 by simple extrapolation. The objects had magnitudes up to 25.7, and that corresponds to objects with diameters of approximately 800 meters. Of those 52, seven of the brightest were already known irregular moons.
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The news
A new study estimates that orbiting Jupiter there would be about 600 moons (all larger than a kilometer)
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.