Jupiter 'grows' 2 more new moons

The total number of 'natural satellites' orbiting this giant planet has been raised to 66, astronomers have revealed.

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Codenamed S / 2011 J1 and S / 2011 J2, these two moons were first identified in a picture taken by the Magellan Telescope - Baade of the Las Campanas Observatory (Chile) on September 27, 2011. .

Jupiter's massive Galilean moon image was captured by NASA.

According to experts, these are two of the smallest moons ever discovered in the solar system, with each moon only about 1 km in diameter.

Unlike Jupiter's four large Galilean moons, from Earth we can also be observed with an amateur telescope, two new moons are very fuzzy and far away from Jupiter. They take 580 and 726 days respectively to complete their rotation.

'This is part of a family of objects turning around around Jupiter,' said astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute of Science (Washington, USA) on Discovery News . 'We believe that the number of moons will not stop there.'

'Reversible objects' are moons with orbits that go in the opposite direction to the planet's rotation direction. If both new moons were taken into account, Jupiter is now gathering up to 52 backward moons, all relatively small. Sheppard estimates there must be about 100 satellites of this size in them.

However, most backward satellites are irregular moons, because they are far from Jupiter and have very eccentric orbits. Thus, Sheppard speculated that these moons were more likely to be meteorites or comet fragments captured by Jupiter's attraction .