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Europa (Jupiter II), the second of the four Galilean moons, is the second closest to Jupiter and the smallest at 3121.6 kilometers in diameter, which is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon. The name comes from a mythical Phoenician noblewoman, Europa , who was courted by Zeus and became the queen of Crete , though the name did not become widely ...
A montage of Jupiter and its four largest moons (distance and sizes not to scale) There are 95 moons of Jupiter with confirmed orbits as of 5 February 2024. [1] [note 1] This number does not include a number of meter-sized moonlets thought to be shed from the inner moons, nor hundreds of possible kilometer-sized outer irregular moons that were only briefly captured by telescopes. [4]
In 1614, Marius published his work Mundus Iovialis (English: World of Jupiter) describing the planet Jupiter and its moons (he previously had published the discovery in 1611 in a local almanac [6]). Here he claimed to have discovered the planet's four major moons about a month before Galileo, who was naturally incensed. [7]
Galilean moons [209] These four moons, discovered by Galileo Galilei and by Simon Marius in parallel, orbit between 400,000 and 2,000,000 km, and are some of the largest moons in the Solar System. Irregular moons Himalia group: A tightly clustered group of prograde-orbiting moons with orbits around 11,000,000–12,000,000 km from Jupiter. [210]
If conditions are clear, anyone with a pair of binoculars or a telescope may even be able to pick out details, such as Jupiter’s four largest moons — Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. The ...
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured images of three of Jupiter's largest moons -- Callisto, Io, and Europa -- crossing the planet's face in the same frame, an occurrence that only happens once ...
On 10 January, Galileo noted that one of them had disappeared, an observation which he attributed to its being hidden behind Jupiter. Within a few days, he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter: he had discovered three of Jupiter's four largest moons. [48] He discovered the fourth on 13 January.
There are 293 confirmed moons in our cosmic neighborhood. By studying these worlds, astronomers hope to learn about ancient asteroid collisions, space volcanoes, and the origins of life itself.