Jupiter's "Mini-Me" Solar System Grows

An anonymous reader writes "University of Hawaii's robotic telescopes have discovered 8 new moons for Jupiter, thus bringing its mini solar system to 48 total. No one knows how Jupiter dissipates the energy of these likely asteroid captures, unless it once had a massively larger atmosphere. Indeed, its ion cloud today seems to spell doom for what Sir Arthur C. Clarke indicated, is another reason to avoid probing life on Europa. ('All these worlds are yours--except Europa. Attempt no landings there.'-- 2010: Odyssey Two). As an aside, one of those NASA sites seem technically to be doing text-to-speech in a very familiar-sounding, Stephen Hawkings version [MP3] of those articles."

Comments

Bad text to speech....

[BWJones]

Geez, I checked out that text to speech link and was surprised the voice was not of any higher quality. Mac users at least, have had much better text to speech quality for years now going back to the mid 90's.

What is a moon?

[$$$$$exyGal]

Specifically, my question is:

How close does an natural astronomical body have to orbit a planet for it to be a moon?

I know there has been much debate about what a planet is (the Pluto debate, etc), but what exactly is a moon? Would it be possible for an object to travel into the Solar System, and then whip around Jupiter, and then reenter the Solar System, etc (without actually getting that close to the sun). If it did that, then would it be a Jupiter-moon?

Picture of Jupiter

[rodney dill]

The astronomy picture of the day a few days ago had a nice moving picture of Jupiter with two moons. Where did the other 46 go?


(feeble Karma saving attempt)

Re:Europa's not the only possibility

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Life would be underwater, in an ocean tens of kilometers deep, the radiations won't penetrate that far. So don't rule out Europa."

Just wanted to bring up a point that's not considered very often: Life here on Earth exists in some VERY harsh environments. I don't think there's a natural area of Earth that's completely devoid of life. If you go underwater deep enough, you'll find life forms that exist without any light reaching them near some very hot thermal vents in the ocean floor.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if an ocean bearing planet or moon didn't have life.

Exactly !

[Evil Pete]

How is a radiation field going to penetrate kilometres of ice ... or even a few metres ? It can't. Timothy didn't even bother to read the original article which made NO mention of that conclusion .. he thought that up by himself.

Europa still looks good. In fact it looks like the best place to me.

Re:Europa's not the only possibility

[RayBender]

This is a bit of a repeat story, so the response is worth repeating: high levels of radiation do not preclude life, and in any case the idea was that Europan life would be under kilometers of ocean.

It's amazing how much radiation certain bacteria can survive, though..

By the way, NASA is thinking about a new mission to the Galilean moons, called JIMO . Very exciting stuff - it's amazing how much more you can do with a nuclear propulsion stage.

Re:But what are their names?

[CheshireCatCO]

Jupiter's moons are all named (saith the official Internation Astronomers' Union rules) after paramours of Jupiter/Zeus. There are a few exceptions, named for the nurses of the young Jupiter.

But even with Zeus's ... er... excesses, we're running out of names.

(Saturn's moons are all titans, I believe, Neptune's are minor gods and goddess associated with, well, Neptune, and Uranus's are named for Shakespeare and Pope characters. Mostly sprites, I think.)

Re:Spell doom for the system

[wideBlueSkies]

Yeah, but they're working on this technology using the work done at Lake Vostok as an example.