Slashdot Mirror
43 More Moons Discovered Orbiting Jupiter
linuxwrangler writes "Scott S. Sheppard, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii, has discovered 43 more moons orbiting Jupiter more than doubling the number of known Jovian moons. The small moons, which follow wildly irregular orbits, are thought to be the result of ancient collisions of larger moons. Sheppard used a 2.2 and a 3.6 meter telescope at the Mauna Kea observatory to catalog the moons."
Earth has a 'moon' in a very strange horseshoe shaped orbit, and it's named Cruithne.
m l
http://burtleburtle.net/bob/physics/cruithne.ht
It's pronounced Croo-EEN-ya, which is Celtic I think.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Actually, grad students at the University of Hawaii are privileged in that UH gets telescope time on every telescope on the mountain for free, either 10 or 15% of all allocated time. This puts UH staff and students in an enviable position where they do not have to go through stricter reviews in order to get telescope time on some of the best telescopes in the world.
Some (if not most) of the telescopes on Mauna Kea are oversubscribed, which means that for every night of available observing time they have more than one night of applications. More clearly stated, when applications roll in the total number of nights applied for might be, say, 150 nights in a six-month period when there might only be 100 nights available.
That's for regular applicants. Remember that UH gets 10 to 15% of the time straight off the top. There are some telescopes on Mauna Kea where the UH observers don't know what to do with their time!
And for what it's worth, there aren't that many jobs available for moon hunters. It's an extremely small field and, in my opinion, an extremely uninteresting one from any kind of theoretical point of view. All you do is get a big telescope with a wide field camera, point it just off the side of Jupiter, take a bunch of pictures, and see if anything moved. There's little innovation or new ideas involved, which is why something like this was left to a grad student.
And it's not like you need to have a PhD to get published. As an undergrad student I was published twice and had posters involving my work presented at two or three conferences. And some of that work was using possibly the most famous telescope of all -- the Hubble Space Telescope.
Not to degrade Mr. Sheppard's discovery, but it's not that big a deal, really.