An international team made up of researchers from France and the United States has created a new computer simulation of how the Solar System formed, and this time they have focused on Jupiter and how its moons originated. According to their results, Saturn could have played an important role in the birth of the satellites of Jupiter .
This planet, which is the largest planet in our solar system – its mass is 317 times that of Earth – has a total of sixty-nine moons (that is known), and the scientific community agrees that most of the Smaller, if not all, formed elsewhere in the Solar System, while the largest – Ganymede, Io, Callisto and Europa, known as Galilean satellites because they were discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei – would have originated near the Solar System itself. planet.
However, according to the authors of this recent study, there would be a problem with this theory. And it arises when asking the following question: how could these moons originate from nearby material if Jupiter, when it formed, left an empty orbit in its path around the Sun by attracting everything that it encountered in its path? The explanation according to this new computer simulation is that the four Galilean moons probably formed from the material accumulated on the outer edge of Jupiter’s orbit – and that it was out of reach at first – and that it happened thanks to the fact that Saturn took it upon himself to lend a hand to his neighbor . How? By moving close enough to Jupiter, Saturn influenced the orbit of this rock and dust material causing some of it to enter the initially clear space. There that material merged and formed the four moons that we know today.
An “exciting” find
The researchers suggest that if a subsequent study supports the result of this latest computer simulation, their findings could be extrapolated and have a significant impact on the study of other solar systems , which could have gone through a similar process. “Discovering the critical role of Saturn in providing the building blocks for Galilean satellites has been very exciting,” lead author Thomas Ronnet, an astrophysicist at the French University of Aix-Marseille, told Space.com. He also noted that this discovery suggests that giant moon systems are more likely to preferentially form around giant planets in multiplanetary systems.
All these studies respond to the fact that, since previous work has suggested that Ganymede and Callisto may contain oceans of water under their icy surface, scientists want to take a closer look at giant exoplanets in order to find out if they also have large moons and potentially habitable .
Image: NASA
