?Oddball? among 12 new moons discovered around Jupiter

TAMPA: A dozen new moons have been discovered around Jupiter, bringing its total number of known moons to 79, the most of any planet in our solar system, astronomers announced Tuesday. One of the new moons was described as a “real oddball” by researcher Scott Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution for Science, because of its tiny size, it measuring just about a half-mile (one kilometer) across. It also “has an orbit like no other known Jovian moon” and is “likely Jupiter’s smallest known moon,” he added. This oddball takes about a year and a half to circle Jupiter, and orbits at an inclined angle that crosses paths with a swarm of moons traveling in a retrograde, or in the opposite direction of Jupiter’s spin rotation.

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