Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
A rogue neighbor can make life unpredictable. Putting out the trash a day early, playing loud music at all hours, never getting around to fixing that fence.
Jupiter’s moons are getting a sense of what that feels like now, with a newly identified resident careening toward conflict with everyone else. This new moon, called Valetudo, is a bit of a renegade.The worst-case scenario for Valetudo? It’s more serious than an icy glare from the front stoop. “Essentially, it’s going to be like a bug in the windshield,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. “It’s going to slap into something.”
Sheppard is leading a team that scrutinizes the darkest reaches of the solar system. To get the clearest, crispest, most sweeping views from Earth, it helps to get far, far away from other man-made creations, such as electric lights and buildings. “Magnificent desolation,” Sheppard says, is the ideal. “You want to be in the middle of nowhere.” That’s why, in March 2017, the team was studying the sky from the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The observatory is nestled high in the desert mountains of the Atacama region. It’s a few hours’ drive from the nearest city, and the night sky is dazzling. If you go outside late at night and let your eyes adapt, Sheppard says, “the sky blows you away.
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The team had planned to use the observatory’s Blanco four-meter telescope to scout for objects way out, beyond Pluto, and they also decided to train their gaze on Jupiter’s neighborhood in the night sky. They knew that the solar system’s largest planet was going to be bright and hanging in the sky all night. “We could choose our field of observation to be very close to Jupiter, so we could look for things moving at Jupiter’s rate—foreground objects, moving quite fast,” while still on the hunt for relatively slower-moving objects in the fringes of the solar system, Sheppard…
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