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Ganymede, or Jupiter III, is the largest and most massive natural satellite of Jupiter, and in the Solar System.Despite being the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial magnetic field, it is the largest Solar System object without a substantial atmosphere.
The largest, Ganymede, is the largest moon in the Solar System and surpasses the planet Mercury in size (though not mass). Callisto is only slightly smaller than Mercury in size; the smaller ones, Io and Europa, are about the size of the Moon. The three inner moons — Io, Europa, and Ganymede — are in a 4:2:1 orbital resonance with
During this period, Galileo gathered a large amount of information about the Jovian system, making close approaches to all of the Galilean moons and finding evidence for thin atmospheres on three of them, as well as the possibility of liquid water beneath the surfaces of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. It also discovered a magnetic field around ...
Ganymede: Jupiter III Galileo [9] [10] discovered the Galilean moons. These satellites were the first celestial objects that were confirmed to orbit an object other than the Sun or Earth. Galileo saw Io and Europa as a single point of light on 7 January 1610; they were seen as separate bodies the following night. [11] Callisto: Jupiter IV o: 8 ...
Zeus pursues Ganymede on one side, while the youth runs away on the other side, rolling along a hoop while holding aloft a crowing cock. The Ganymede myth was depicted in recognizable contemporary terms, illustrated with common behavior of homoerotic courtship rituals, as on a vase by the "Achilles Painter" where Ganymede also flees with a cock.
In his 1805 book Celestial Mechanics, in addition to laying out his mathematical argument for the resonant orbits of Io, Europa, and Ganymede, Laplace was able to use perturbations on the orbit of Io by Europa and Ganymede to provide the first estimate of Io's mass, 1.73 × 10 −5 of the mass of Jupiter, which was one-quarter of the modern value.
Decades after publication it was discovered that the magnetosphere of Jupiter encloses Ganymede and the other Galilean moons in an analog of Earth's Van Allen radiation belt, subjecting their surfaces to an intense rain of ionizing radiation. The Galileo flyby in 1995 discovered that Ganymede has a magnetosphere, but the shielding effect is ...
Galileo's astronomical discoveries and investigations into the Copernican theory have led to a lasting legacy which includes the categorisation of the four large moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) as the Galilean moons.