Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Moon of Jupiter in Photo from 2003 petapixel.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from petapixel.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
. But something a kilometer across? Sure.
The other issue is that as objects get smaller they get fainter. Jupiter orbits the Sun 5 times farther than the Earth does, so at best we’re about 600 million kilometers from it, and at worst about 900 million. That’s far enough away that looking for objects in the kilometer size range gets pretty tough.
A new study looked at some images taken of Jupiter back in 2010, and using a clever method the astronomers were able to dig deep to look for faint moons orbiting the giant planet. Cutting to the chase, they found 52 objects that fit their criteria. Seven of those were already known, so it looks like they found 45 potentially new ones.