(CNN) – During a quest to find Planet Nine, a mysterious planet believed to be on the edge of our solar system, astronomers discovered something else: 12 new moons around Jupiter. And one of them is quite the oddball.

The discoveries bring the number of Jupiter’s known moons to 79, the most around a single planet in our solar system.

But why are scientists just now finding these moons? Technology is making it easier to observe Jupiter and the area around it in greater detail, proving that discoveries are just waiting to be made in our own corner of the universe.

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Nine of the new moons were found very far from Jupiter, about 25 million kilometers away, moving in a retrograde orbit (the opposite of the planet’s rotation). It takes them about two Earth years to orbit the planet. Sheppard and his team believe that these moons are remnants of three larger moons that broke apart when they collided with other moons, asteroids or comets.

Two other new moons are closer and move in a prograde orbit, which is in line with the direction that Jupiter is moving. Given their distance and angle from Jupiter, they are also most likely pieces of a once-larger moon. They take a little less than a year to orbit the gas giant.

And then there’s the oddball moon. Sheppard believes it could be Jupiter’s smallest, and it has an orbit unlike any other moon around the planet.

It’s been nicknamed Valetudo after the Roman goddess of health and hygiene who is the great-granddaughter of the god Jupiter.

It has a prograde orbit but is more distant and at a different incline. This means it crosses paths with the outer retrograde moons and could collide with them. It’s essentially driving down the highway in the wrong direction, Sheppard explained.

It has most likely collided with other moons, breaking it down into the fragment it is today. Over the course of a billion years, it may even cease to exist.

This survivor could be the last remnant of a once-larger prograde moon that collided with an object to create the retrograde moons.

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