Jupiter Now Has 69 Moons
Caleb Scharf, Scientific American
The planet Jupiter is a beast: Three-hundred-and-seventeen times the mass of the Earth, mostly made of metallic hydrogen, and at the center of an astonishing collective of orbiting natural bodies.In fact, Jupiter's satellites form a shrunken version of a full planetary system: from the tightly bound larger Galilean moons (orbiting in their Laplacian mean-motion resonances, akin to places like TRAPPIST-1) to the remarkable array of smaller moonlets that encircle this world out to more than 30 million kilometers.
The planet Jupiter is a beast: Three-hundred-and-seventeen times the mass of the Earth, mostly made of metallic hydrogen, and at the center of an astonishing collective of orbiting natural bodies.In fact, Jupiter's satellites form a shrunken version of a full planetary system: from the tightly bound larger Galilean moons (orbiting in their Laplacian mean-motion resonances, akin to places like TRAPPIST-1) to the remarkable array of smaller moonlets that encircle this world out to more than 30 million kilometers.