ASTRONOMERS have spotted 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter, bringing the total to 52 – the most for any planet. The new satellites, each between 2 and 4 kilometres across, orbit the gas giant every 500 to 980 days at a distance of up to 25 million kilometres.
All were captured by Jupiter in the distant past, and may be fragments of larger captured bodies, says David Jewitt, who discovered the satellites with colleague Scott Sheppard using the 8-metre Subaru telescope at the University of Hawaii. So far only 27 have been named, and at least one other has been seen and…
