New Jovian Moon Discovered

Mr. GuySmiley writes: "Astronomers of the SpaceWatch Project have discovered a another moon orbiting Jupiter. It has been over 25 years since the last discovery of an outer Jovian satellite (Voyager found three inner moons in 1979). The moon has been designated S/1999 J 1. This brings the total number of moons orbiting Jupiter to 17. Hail the King of the Planets!"

Comments

the gods

[Frymaster]

S/1999 J 1.

I'm glad to see that they are sticking with the tradition of the roman pantheon as nomenclature.... I did a paper in university on the pre-christian festivals of S/1999J1...

Definition of a moon

[bguilliams]

I'm a big fan of Jupiter and it's moons. And I was initally thrilled by reading the headline. However, it quickly occured to me that a Jovial moon that has not been discovered until recently, must be tiny. A space turd, if you will. Sure enough, the article mentions an estimate for the diameter of the moon at about 3 miles. It's a bit hard to get excited about an ordinary asteroid that happened to get caught in Jupiter's gravitational field.

But, technically, it's a new moon because it orbits a planet. Of course, every man-made satellite that we've put in orbit around Jupiter, not to mention the Earth, is also, technically, a moon. Not to mention other items, like the infamous glove lost by an astronaut, which will orbit the Earth as a small, insignificant moon until getting sucked in a bit too close to the atmosphere.

I even seem to remember reading, perhaps on slashdot, about a comet with a hugely erratic orbit that scientists believe centers around the earth. So, we have 2 natural moons!

In reality, if we lived on Jupiter, and scientists told us that there was a tiny 3 mile long pebble orbitting 15 million miles from the surface that we couldn't see with our naked eye, would we call it a moon? Or would we not worry about it because we're getting squished by the massive gravitational field and dealing with the fact that we're trying to stand on a gaseous planet?