How many moons does Jupiter have?

It might not be the number you guessed.

via SyFy

The question is hard to answer as is. For one thing, how small a thing do you call a moon? If, say, something the size of Baby Yoda orbited Jupiter, I wouldn’t call it a moon*. But something a kilometer across? Sure.

The other issue is that as objects get smaller they get fainter. Jupiter orbits the Sun 5 times farther than the Earth does, so at best we’re about 600 million kilometers from it, and at worst about 900 million. That’s far enough away that looking for objects in the kilometer size range gets pretty tough.

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