Various groupings of Jovian moons with the newly discovered ones shown in bold. The 'oddball,' called Valetudo after the Roman god Jupiter's great-granddaughter, has a prograde orbit that crosses the retrograde orbits. | Roberto Molar-Candanosa, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science.

Various groupings of Jovian moons with the newly discovered ones shown in bold. The 'oddball,' called Valetudo after the Roman god Jupiter's great-granddaughter, has a prograde orbit that crosses the retrograde orbits. | Roberto Molar-Candanosa, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science.

A newly discovered moon around Jupiter — spotted traveling in a strange orbit — likely crashed into some of the gas giant's other satellites long ago, transforming a few worlds into many.

The moon, named Valetudo after the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter, is among 12 new moons found around the planet.

But the oddball moon may be the most interesting because it tells researchers more about what Jupiter's moons looked like long ago.

Researchers have known that Jupiter had three groups of moons. There were the Galilean moons, first discovered by Italian scientist Galileo in the 16th-century, which formed from a cloud of gas and dust around Jupiter while the giant planet was young.

Two other groups of moons are essentially objects captured by Jupiter's orbit when they flew too close to the huge planet. Prograde moons travel in the same direction as Jupiter's rotation, but are located beyond the closely orbiting Galileans. Retrograde moons travel opposite to Jupiter's spin and in the outer reaches of the Jovian system.

Eleven of the 12 new moons fit into these prograde or retrograde groups, but not the oddball Valetudo.

Valetudo is zipping along in an orbit that is opposite to its retrograde neighbors and that crosses their paths at an inclined angle. In other words, the moon is like a car speeding along a highway in the wrong direction, Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Science, told Seeker.

And like a car careening dangerously on a busy roadway, Valetudo caused celestial crashes in the past that broke a few retrograde moons into several.

"What we think happened was there were three much larger retrograde moons, which were hundreds of kilometers in size. The parent moons were hit by something and they were broken apart," Sheppard said, adding that the something was likely Valetudo.

Sheppard was principal investigator with the research team that made the discovery.