Jupiter is crowned as the planet with the most “followers” in the entire Solar System. A team of astronomers from the Carnegie Institution has just confirmed the existence of 12 previously undiscovered moons that orbit this planet.
Thanks to this, Jupiter goes from 80 to 92 surrounding stars, making it the planet with the most moons, now surpassing Saturn by a wide margin, the previous leader of that record with a total of 83 stars around it. .
This planet has unique qualities that over the years have made it stand out from the rest of the neighbors that make up the Solar System.
A few days ago, in fact, we reported how new findings around Jupiter confirmed that in the past this planet was literally a killer of moons.
Which ends up explaining in part how now in a star full of these satellites, due in large part to its current constitution.
Jupiter is the planet with moons in the entire Solar System
The news agency Associated Press (AP) reports how this finding is the product of a project whose development would have taken a couple of years.
Where telescopes located in Chile and Hawaii were responsible for discovering these new ones between 2021 and 2022, reaching the point of observing some specific qualities of the moons.
For example, their diameter ranging from one to three kilometers in size could mostly be considered as the average size, although five would have a diameter of more than 8 kilometers.
It is very interesting that in the newly discovered moons, those closest to the planet revolve around it for more than 340 Earth days to complete a single orbit.
But 9 of the 12 moons, which are the most remote, take a total of 550 Earth days to complete their orbit. I mean, almost two years.
The conclusions of this project estimate that these stars would actually be fragments of other larger moons that collided with comets, asteroids or each other thousands of years ago.
In the end, the list of planets and their respective number of moons looks like this:
- Mercury does not have a single moon.
- Venus also lacks these stars.
- Earth has a moon, the one we all know about.
- Mars has two moons in total.
- Jupiter now has 92 moons.
- Saturn follows with 83 stars.
- Uranus has 27 moons.
- Neptune has 14 moons.
As we can see, the Earth is close to occupying the last places on the list. But, paradoxically, the moon of our planet is the most significant for all of humanity.