Two More Moons Have Been Found Around Jupiter

An amazing discovery has been made, we’ve just discovered Jupiter has two more moons than we thought, bringing its grand total up to 69 moons. The newly discovered moons currently don't have names, instead they are being called  S/2016 J1 and   S/2017 J1. The “S” here means satellite and the “J” means Jupiter.

The two new moons were found by a team of astronomers led by Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution .

Both moons are thought to be about one to two kilometers in size. They orbit about 21 million kilometers and 24 million kilometers from Jupiter. Both moons were first observed in March 2016 and March 2017 by the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. They were found during a survey that was looking for Planet Nine. During the observing campaigns, most of the known moons of Jupiter were found, as well as several that were not known or were lost. There are likely a few more new moons as well in the 2017 observations, but they need to be reobserved in 2018 to determine which of the discoveries are new and which are lost 2003 moons. S/2016 J1 takes 1.65 years to orbit the planet and  S/2017 J1 takes approximately 2 years.

Like most of Jupiter’s moons they have a retrograde orbit, which means that they orbit in the opposite direction to how Jupiter rotates. The size of both new moons is consistent with many of Jupiter’s smaller moons.
 This discovery puts Jupiter in a clear first place in terms of number of moon swith 69 moons while Saturn being second with 62 moons. Jupiter also being the biggest planet, and recently confirmed as the Solar System’s oldest world .

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