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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.
.... That's no moon ....
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.
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?
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?
But then Reliant visits the fifth planet, in the mistaken belief that it's the sixth?
Titius-Bode law. Using it, one can predict where a planet should orbit from it's ordinal number. So the Reliant expected the sixth planet there, based on the orbit's radius.
This is what happened in our solar system, for example: Jupiter's orbit corresponds to the sixth planet, based on Titius-Bode. However, Jupiter is only the fifth planet because its gravitational perturbation blocked what should have been the fifth planet from accreting - but you can still find the components on the fifth Titius-Bode orbit, in the form of the asteroid belt.
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?"