On Tuesday, Jupiter officially “gained” 10-12 moons. But that doesn’t make up for the dozens of moons the solar system has lost over time. Unlike the recent crop, the long lost moons were of pretty substantial size. This includes even a few now missing moons for Jupiter.
The king of our planets started out in a gas envelope, like the other planets. It’s system had quite a bit of heft, but the slow drag of this cloud may have pulled in moons as large as Mercury into the inner hell of the planet below.
“Some people say that if a huge disk of gas were around Jupiter for too long, moons would begin to fall in,” says Matija Cuk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.
