Jupiter's Eleven New Moons

nautical9 writes "Yahoo is reporting that scientists have discovered 11 new moons orbiting around Jupiter, bringing the total to 39. They were discovered using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope and one of the largest digital imaging cameras in the world. Unfortunately, very little is known about them at this point other than that they're relatively small (compared to the previously known ones), and they all have irregular orbits."

Comments

Shoemaker

[ObviousGuy]

Could these be remnants of Jupiter's surface having been ejected by the impact of the Shoemaker comet?

Very interesting. Would have been better with better pics, though.

Re:trend?

[meringuoid]

I'd like to see Earth improve its moon count, as we have only one.

Actually, we sort of have two. There's an asteroid called Cruithne that has a curious orbit around the Earth and Sun...

Re:What about the orbits?

[guacamolefoo]

"What do they mean with "excentric" or "irregular" orbits? They also mention "long, elliptical orbits" but that's more the opposite of irregular, isn't it?"

Orbiting in the direction opposite to the rotation of the planet and orbiting at an incline relative to the planet and orbiting elliptically. A typical orbit being (per our local prejudice) being somewhat circular as opposed to more elliptical.

I tend to agree with the conclusions of the researchers that the irregularity of the orbits of some suggests that the objects were trapped by Jupiter's gravity and that they have broken up over time. My initial thought was that Jupiter sucks up an inordinate amount of junk. Asteroids and comets fly by earth with some regularity. It would not surprise me if similar objects flying by Jupiter would get sucked into an orbit on occasion. There has certainly been enough time since the formation of the solar system to have this happen with some degree of regularity.

The similarities with the other gas giants having much larger numbers of moons and irregular moons(Saturn in particular) suggests that this may be a common attribute of gas giants, based on our extensive sample size of four.

I wonder how long it will be until these objects completely degrade into smaller bits of debris or perhaps ring material?

I also wonder how much crap Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus/Neptune have sucked out of the solar system (asteroids, comets, etc.)? I also wonder how much we should be thankful that there are a number of gas giants in our solar system to clean up some of the Kuiper belt visitors and the closer meteorite bits/asteroids in the inner solar system? It is quite possible that we are here to /. about this because Jupiter has taken a few on the chin for us. On the other hand, maybe there would be another planet between Jupiter and Mars if it weren't for Jupiter, reducing the number of asteroids out there.

Guac-foo, full of speculation and wonder at the cosmos -- billyuns and billyuns of SWAGs this morning.