A LONG-STANDING puzzle about how the giant planets of our Solar System collected so many moons has been solved by a team of chemists more at home studying the trajectories of atoms.
“It’s very impressive that they can jump fields like this. It’s a nice piece of work,” says Douglas Hamilton, an astronomer from the University of Maryland, College Park.
In recent years astronomers have been on a roll where moons are concerned. Rapid developments in telescope technology have doubled our Solar System’s moon count since 1997, to the grand total of 128. Jupiter, being the closest giant planet, claims…
