Astronomers Are Constantly Discovering New Moons Surrounding Jupiter

It has now overtaken Saturn as the planet with the most moons.

Transcript

00:00Jupiter and Saturn both have some pretty famous moons like the former's Europa and Ganymede and

00:09the latter's moon Titan but did you know that each of them has dozens upon dozens of moons and

00:14Jupiter has just taken the lead again as the planet with the most moons astronomers were

00:18pretty sure Jupiter had 80 moons now that number has increased to 92 after finding 12 more orbiting

00:24the largest planet in the solar system the new moons have yet to be named but their trajectories

00:29have been mapped and outlined and they were sort of discovered by accident by Carnegie

00:32institution for science astronomer Scott Shepard while looking for confirmation of the elusive

00:37planet nine saying about the happenstance quote Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the

00:41search fields where we were looking for extremely distant solar system objects so why did it take

00:46scientists so long to find these dozen moons well moons are hard to see as they're quite dim especially

00:51when you take into account just how large and bright Jupiter is in fact Jupiter can often be seen with

00:55the naked eye at night as it's about the size of 1300 planet Earths