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Astronomers Discover 12 New Moons Orbiting Jupiter - One on Collision Course With the Others (theguardian.com)
One of a dozen new moons discovered around Jupiter is circling the planet on a suicide orbit that will inevitably lead to its violent destruction, astronomers say. From a report: Researchers in the US stumbled upon the new moons while hunting for a mysterious ninth planet that is postulated to lurk far beyond the orbit of Neptune, the most distant planet in the solar system. The team first glimpsed the moons in March last year from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, but needed more than a year to confirm that the bodies were locked in orbit around the gas giant. "It was a long process," said Scott Sheppard, who led the effort at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC. Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, was hardly short of moons before the latest findings. The fresh haul of natural satellites brings the total number of Jovian moons to 79, more than are known to circle any other planet in our cosmic neighbourhood. A head-on collision between two Jovian moons would create a crash so large it would be visible from earth, astronomers said.
TLDR: “Collisions don’t happen all that frequently, every billion years or so,” said Sheppard. “If one did happen, we would be able to detect it from Earth, but it is unlikely to happen anytime soon.”
We already have NINE planets.
*mic drop*
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
>> stumbled upon (Jupiter's) new moons while hunting for a mysterious ninth planet
I think I figured out why they didn't find the ninth planet: they were looking at the fifth.
If the collision time can be predicted, I hope they send a probe to catch the Big Smash close up.
Table-ized A.I.
.... That's no moon ....
They're supposed to have converted Jupiter into a 2nd sun by now.
...may collide...
nothing to see here - move along
That astrophysicists and astronomers are always explaining how the universe began, how it works, how many stars there are, where black holes are, estimating the numbers of "Earth-like" planets there are and how many likely support life... and then they discover 12 more moons around Jupiter or some other enormous hole in the knowledge of our own galactic neighborhood.
And what exactly is your point? Little tiny hard to see dark things that are far away are hard to see. News at 11.
Hell, they can't even determine with any real accuracy the number of stars in the Milky Way.
It's a little hard to get an exact count when you have an immensely bright galactic core blocking your view of much of the galaxy. It's actually easier to count the stars in other galaxies because we can see more of them. Again, what exactly is your point?
Maybe we should be less concerned with what may or may not have happened 13.8 billion years ago and start focusing on what's immediately around us.
Thanks for setting the astrophysics community straight. I'm sure they'll be grateful for your help because you clearly know what's important to their jobs more than they do.
Like going back to the moon and performing experiments there before playing around with sending people on a one-way trip to Mars.
You have no idea what astrophysicists and astronomers actually do, do you? Here's a tip. They aren't the ones sending people to the moon or to mars. You might not want to get your job descriptions confused or you might seem ignorant in public.
The Jovian system is all around fascinating. With all of the moons and Jupiter's large EM field, it's a great future destination for humanity. Build a few thousand (big) rotating habitats over a couple centuries and all-in-all I could see the Jovian system supporting more human life than currently exists on Earth. Well, at least in the far future (if we have one). Especially with the asteroid belt being between Mars and Jupiter. Not that it would be easy.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
You might have heard about it.
Stars are "born", "die", and merge. Any exact number would soon be obsolete. And pointless.
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This isn't a video game. We can run more than one research project at a time.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
A head-on collision between two Jovian moons would create a crash so large it would be visible from earth, astronomers said. --- Ok, what time frame: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia?
Or maybe we should keep learning what we can about everything, near and far? There are two kinds of ignorance: the things you KNOW you don't know, and the things you DON'T KNOW you don't know. The researchers went to work trying to answer a question of the first type (some orbital observations of bodies in the solar system suggest a planet or something else odd floating about in distant space) and ended up answering a question of the second type. Nobody suspected additional moons around Jupiter or had suggested looking for them.
They have just enough data to verify they are orbiting Jupiter.
It is not worth informing the public about possible collisions.
Science journalism is uniformly terrible.
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Astronomers Discover 12 New Moons Orbiting Jupiter - One on Collision Course With the Others
Oh no, when they collide most of the boulders will be flung directly at Earth, mainly New York and San Francisco!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Maybe we should be less concerned with what may or may not have happened 13.8 billion years ago and start focusing on what's immediately around us.
There are 7.6 billion of us. It is okay if we work on multiple problems at once. Having a few hundred folks studying the Jovian system is fine. It truly does not detract from anything else.
If we can demote planets (Ceres too was once counted as a planet), it is time to tighten up the definition of moon.
Exactly what do you think is loose about the definition? I'm not opposed to the idea but what do you find confusing or misleading about the current definition?
We should be redefining things with some regularity as we learn more. We probably should have different categories for different types of planets. Jupiter is a far different sort of object than Earth. Pluto and Eris probably are a separate category of object as well. Call them a planet if you like (I don't care) but then you have to say what kind of planet. Otherwise it's like saying a lion and your house cat are the same thing when they clearly are not.
Jupiter has four moons, and a bunch of rocks making up a 1/300 of one percent of the total mass in orbit. And Mars, sorry.
If my count is right at least 13 of Jupiter's moons are larger than either of the moons of Mars. Relative size definitions don't really make much sense. Absolute size definitions seem to be pretty arbitrary. How would you propose changing the definition to account for something not currently accounted for?
I remember back in high school the textbooks said "Jupiter has exactly this many moons. The end. Period. We're right. We know everything. Astronomers are never wrong." or something like that. Ironic considering all of astronomy is one giant history of being constantly wrong and representing it as right. Can't wait for them to disprove dark matter as a math error.
Mars is immediately around us and we are performing experiments there. Mars has essentially nothing to do with what may or may not have happened 13.8 billion years ago. Though this isn't the same as human colonization efforts if that's what you're referring to.
What, pray tell, is a head-on collision when talking about celestial objects? Will air bags deploy where there are NOT adequate atmospheres on either one?
Forest from the trees, et al
moox. for a new generation.
After all these years, I still haven't figured this out: the sixth planet explodes (and presumably all its debris completely disappears in about 15 years). [deep breath] Ok!
But then Reliant visits the fifth planet, in the mistaken belief that it's the sixth? That's .. [another deep breath] a surprising mistake!
"The shock shifted the orbits" seems like a lot of handwaving to me. Anyone wanna explain?
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
A planet is, by the literal definition of the word, something circling around a sun.
Yes, that includes every microplanet, asteroid, astronaut and severed "planet" redefiner micropenis.
I'd love to see a citation (ISBN, Chapter, Page, Paragraph) for that. My guess is that you are simply mistaken at best and full of shit at worst.
The count of stars, or exoplanets, or moons within the solar system are all that we now know. Every jump in accuracy or our detection methods brings forth more. This does not mean that we somehow screwed up in our first estimation.
One moon is on a collision course? Wouldn't it require two moons to be on collision courses? Unless this is like interplanetary bowling where the other eleven moons are lined up in formation :)
You act like there is only a total of ten people on the planet working on this. Aren't there enough people working on this in the world to do more than one thing at once?
ur not docktor
I remember the days when "Abi" at Subway only offered "hweet or hwite" breads.
Make your own food people - you will feel healthier just from the de-stressing you get from preparing it.
It is not true that gluten is good for you. For most folks it is not harmful, but the gluten amino acid is not used in human tissue. So it's no more "good for you" than starch, even though it's technically a protein.
OTOH, in bread making, gluten can form a network which keeps in the carbon dioxide generated by the yeast, causing the bread to rise. So for bread making, it's useful.
I remember my father's response when I told him about 20 years ago that Jupiter had multiple moons: "Why would God put so many moons there when there's no-one there to see their moonlight?"
I mean it is too broad. It could include million of pebbles in unstable orbits. Or ice cubes slowly "orbiting" each other in the Kuiper belt.
So what? I don't say that to be snide (seriously) but why does it objectively matter where it is a small number or a big number so long as the definition is a useful one? If the most useful definition of a planet or a moon results in millions of them I don't see that as a problem. I'm open to categories that have small numbers of objects in them but there has to be a useful reason to make the distinction.
There could be countless rocks orbiting earth too. When there was one moon, and then five, we knew what the word meant. Now it is too open and never-ending.
The universe is under no obligation to conform to what you think is convenient. We're in a universe that is billions of light years in diameter with almost countless galaxies and stars and you are worried about there being a lot of pebbles surrounding some large rocks in an insignificant star system?
Yep. That's why I said "sorry, Mars". They are only temporary rocks. Phobos will be gone in a few million years, while the seven "real" moons will be there for billions at least.
Any planet with a sufficient number of moons is probably going to have some with unstable orbits. Again I'm not hearing any principled reason why we shouldn't define that as a moon. I hear what you are saying but your argument seems to be based on what you find comfortable and familiar rather than from objective differences between categories of objects.
I think it states: "Maybe we should be less concerned with what may or may not have happened 13.8 billion years ago and start focusing on what's immediately around us.
No you make and argument about what astrophysicists do and then say they should be worried about doing what the folks at NASA and SpaceX are doing as if they somehow are wasting their time. Those are not mutually exclusive activities. So you haven't made a useful point here.
Like going back to the moon and performing experiments there before playing around with sending people on a one-way trip to Mars."
The people who are concerned with what happened 13.8 billion years ago are not the same people who are sending people to Mars. That's like arguing that someone who is really good at cooking should take up farming because they both happen to involve food. It's a stupid argument by someone who doesn't understand either profession adequately.
You may want to bone up on your reading comprehension skills.
Once you stop conflating concepts we can discuss my reading comprehension.
Wrong! And while wheat germ contains more gluten also contains methionine, which is essential in humans. And it's one of many reasons why whole wheat bread has worked as staple and famine food for centuries.
So I like the idea of there being one and only one Moon. Our Moon.
Just like there is one Sun, the rest are just stars.
So Jupiter has zero Moons. But does have a bunch of orbiting debris around it, some of which are quite large! :)