Hello, wonderful person, this is Anton and today we're going to be talking about a new discovery on Jupiter.
And this is of course the Juno mission that actually is currently on Jupiter doing some important scientific research.
So what exactly is its discovery? Well, it's just like the title says. It's actually the two new moons and today
we're going to briefly talk about them and just summarize what is actually happening right here on Jupiter that we just flew by
Anyway, welcome to What Da Math.
And
The date is June of 2017 this is when two
scientists working on
discovering Planet 9 were looking into the skies and were trying to measure various
deviations in various objects and that just so happens
Jupiter was passing by in their telescope, and they decided to take a look at it anyway, and
and during
their observations, they actually were staring at the skies and discovered something very unusual moving
right beside Jupiter at a distance of about
22 million
kilometers, and I'm going to show you
where this approximately is in relation to all of the other moons of Jupiter because we're going to actually place these moons as
they're not really available in Universe Sandbox just yet. So we're going to just select a random small moon and
we're going to go with a distance of about
21 to about 24 million kilometers, so that's around here-ish so let's place one right here
and let's place one more right here. So that you can kind of see that
it's where all the other irregular moons of Jupiter are. So, I didn't actually name them properly let's rename them as well.
This first moon is currently known as S/2016 J 1.
This here stands for the date when it was first observed,
but people didn't really realize was a moon of Jupiter,
and this here is Jupiter, and the second moon is known as S/2017 J 1. Now,
they're not actually that big. As a matter of fact, they're very very small. They're only about one kilometer in size.
So they're just tiny tiny tiny rocks, and
that's why we actually had so much trouble finding them for so many years,
and there's probably a lot more of these moons out there that we still haven't found, and ,as you can see,
some of the moons of Jupiter still don't actually have a proper name,
but some of them do, and all of these names, just like the new moons, are actually names of
the lovers of God Jupiter. Jupiter is also, of course, the Roman name for
a Greek God by the name of Zeus,
and you've ever read anything in the Greek mythology you may remember that Zeus was a very promiscuous
God he basically had a lot of lovers and there's at least
69 of them
out there, and interestingly even though these are... all of these are names of his lovers
the mission that came to Jupiter to study it,
and I'm of course talking about the Juno spacecraft that we're going to place here as well.
Juno was the wife of Jupiter.
So it's kind of like a... almost like an ongoing joke in NASA that
they basically sends his wife to go and check up on him, and
she's clearly not happy because there's a lot of lovers orbiting around Jupiter.
So anyway, let's go back to the moons that we discovered. So...
Well, just actually moons in general. So we know that Jupiter has now 69 confirmed moons, most of them have names, and
their orbit differs from about seven hours to
something like a thousand days. Some of the further moons here
take about a thousand days to orbit around Jupiter, and that's of course three years
orbit, which is really really long.
15 Moons of Jupiter, the closer ones,
actually have
regular orbits, they basically orbit in this direction, and they all follow in pretty much the same plane, but
the other moons, since here
we're talking about the 54 other moons, have irregular orbits which I'm going to show you in a second.
They have orbits that look
all over the place and they usually orbit in a completely different direction from Jupiter, implying that they were actually very likely
almost 100 percent
captured asteroids from the asteroid belt that came too close to Jupiter and basically got captured by its gravitational pull.
A lot of these moons also have resonance, and this is very very important for us because Jupiter is sort of like a miniature solar system.
It actually allows us to study some of these solar systems like Trappist-1 because it represents
a very miniature solar system where things orbit and
act on each other in the same way as they would in an actual solar system. So like these four moons,
Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
They actually have a pattern of orbit, and they have a resonance so for every orbit of Io, Europa usually does two and for every
orbit of Europa, Ganymede does
two, or actually either way around, sorry. For two orbits of Europa, Ganymede does two.
So there is a resonance between them
which is very very common in solar systems as well as we now know, and this is actually a very interesting
Representation of Trappist system because we are now convinced that Trappist's... Trappist planets actually are
similar to these moons and they are also
almost certainly
tidally locked; basically they always have their face
pointing at the center, meaning that they're always hot on one side, and they're always cold on the other side.
But, you know what? I'm kind of talking more about Jupiter than the actual moons that we discovered, and that's because of a very very
obvious reason: that we don't actually know anything about them. So this moon right there,
S/2016 J1,
that's pretty much all we probably know about it, that it's about 1 to 2 kilometers big it's
it's basically an asteroid that was captured. It orbits
somewhere around
21 to 24 million kilometers away from Jupiter, and its composition is fairly similar to asteroids.
But, the only other thing we know about it, or the only other thing we can imply from this particular moon, and
also the moon by the name of S/2017 J 1, is that there's probably quite a lot of other moons we haven't discovered yet,
specifically smaller ones. So far we've been pretty good at discovering everything up to about one kilometer in size, so anything from 1 to 60 kilometers is
already kind of difficult to detect, but we're kind of able to, but anything smaller than one kilometer is
very challenging, which is why
that it's very likely
there's maybe up to a hundred or even several hundred actual moons orbiting here that we might not discover for a long long time.
And, well anyway, that's all I wanted to talk about in this video
I just wanted to talk about these two new moons we discovered, briefly remind you of how awesome Jupiter is,
talk about his other moons, or not his even though it's a god, its other moons and give you an idea about
all of these names that you probably have never even heard of, and remember all of these are lovers of Zeus,
which also is why he had so many different children from so many different women in the Greek mythology.
including of course the infamous Hercules
But anyway, so that's all I want to say
Thank you so much for watching please subscribe if you still haven't
share this video with someone who enjoys watching space stuff and let's finish this video by
going to a simulation known as "Exploding Jupiter" and just watch it explode beautifully, and there we go. And now
all of these moons will actually probably
stop orbiting and
fly their own way.
Anyway, I'll see you guys tomorrow. Come back tomorrow to learn something else. Looks like we actually burned quite a lot of these moons
and a lot of them are on fire.
See you tomorrow, space out and as always bye-bye.