After their observations and more than a year of follow-ups and confirmations, they announced this week that they found 12 new moons.Īs a whole they’re not so unusual or remarkable, except, perhaps, for that rogue, Valetudo. The telescope in Chile, with a powerful digital camera that can shade against glare and scattered light, provided Sheppard and his collaborators with a wider and more detailed view than had been possible before. Because the planet is so big and bright, researchers surmised that unrecorded moons could be faint, or even obscured, or quite far from the gas giant. “We could kill two birds with one stone: survey for Jupiter moons and very distant objects at the same time.”īefore Sheppard’s team conducted their survey, there were 69 known Jovian moons, but there’s always been reason to believe there are quite a few more. “We could choose our field of observation to be very close to Jupiter, so we could look for things moving at Jupiter’s rate-foreground objects, moving quite fast,” while still on the hunt for relatively slower-moving objects in the fringes of the solar system, Sheppard says. They knew that the solar system’s largest planet was going to be bright and hanging in the sky all night. The team had planned to use the observatory’s Blanco four-meter telescope to scout for objects way out, beyond Pluto, and they also decided to train their gaze on Jupiter’s neighborhood in the night sky. Courtesy Carnegie Institution for Science If you go outside late at night and let your eyes adapt, Sheppard says, “the sky blows you away.” Valetudo, as spotted through the Magellan telescope in May 2018. It’s a few hours’ drive from the nearest city, and the night sky is dazzling. The observatory is nestled high in the desert mountains of the Atacama region. “You want to be in the middle of nowhere.” That’s why, in March 2017, the team was studying the sky from the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. “Magnificent desolation,” Sheppard says, is the ideal. To get the clearest, crispest, most sweeping views from Earth, it helps to get far, far away from other man-made creations, such as electric lights and buildings. Sheppard is leading a team that scrutinizes the darkest reaches of the solar system. “Essentially, it’s going to be like a bug in the windshield,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. The worst-case scenario for Valetudo? It’s more serious than an icy glare from the front stoop. This new moon, called Valetudo, is a bit of a renegade. Jupiter’s moons are getting a sense of what that feels like now, with a newly identified resident careening toward conflict with everyone else. Putting out the trash a day early, playing loud music at all hours, never getting around to fixing that fence. Wikimedia Commons/CC by SA 3.0Ī rogue neighbor can make life unpredictable. The Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile is “magnificently desolate,” according to astronomer Scott Sheppard.
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