Hold Onto Your Anus: 12 New Moons Were Found Orbiting Jupiter

Nat Geo – In a curveball of cosmic proportions, astronomers went looking for a hypothetical planet on the far fringes of our solar system, and instead found 12 new moons dancing around Jupiter.

To be clear, these moons are no Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. They’re tiny, some barely a mile across, and they are tracing all kinds of weird paths around the giant world.

The team found the new moons almost by accident, thanks to a serendipitous alignment of Jupiter with their initial research project and some recently installed telescope technology.

I’m gonna come out and put this on record right from the jump here; I don’t understand space much at all. Frankly it hurts my brain when I even try to think about it. It’s too big (That’s what she said) and there’s just too much to comprehend. I get that we have our own little solar system where all the planets orbit around the same sun, but based on what I DO understand, space as we know know it is constantly expanding and there are more planets and stars and solar systems than even the smartest scientists can begin to comprehend, let alone study.

With that in mind, the fact that we’re just now discovering 12 new moons orbiting Jupiter isn’t TOO shocking, but I’m still a little pissed about it. Based on the 45 seconds of research I just did, scientists have been on record saying Jupiter has at least 69 moons (nice), the 4 largest of them discovered by some astronomer named Galileo Galilei in 1610. Since then we’ve identified a buttload more, although most of them are pretty small and insignificant.

I don’t mean to take a huge dump on the science parade here, but what exactly classifies something as a moon? How are you gonna tell me that Earth, the greatest planet in the solar system, only gets one (1) single moon, but Jupiter is out there floating around with 69-81 moons, depending on who you ask? I’m more of a sabermetrics guy, but the numbers just don’t add up here.

Folks. If we’ve got any scientists reading this right now (God I hope there aren’t any actual real scientists reading my blogs because if that’s the case we’re all fucked), I have a few simple requests. Earth needs more moons. We absolutely need more moons. Can we make moons? Can Elon Musk make us a moon? Someone has to step up and start putting the planet on it’s back, so we don’t have to sit around a few hundred years from now when all the aliens come from space and invade our planet and belittle us for only having one (1) moon.

Let Jupiter have their small, shitty moons. I’m already over that. It’s time for us to hop back in our spaceships and regain control of our solar system once and for all. I’m not asking for 69 moons, that’d be unrealistic. But I think we can hit double digits. Is that too much to ask? Someone please figure it the fuck out.