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From top to bottom: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. "Family portrait" of Jupiter and the Galilean moons captured by Juno. The Galilean moons (/ ˌɡælɪˈleɪ.ən /), [ 1 ] or Galilean satellites, are the four largest moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They are the most readily visible Solar System objects after Saturn, the ...
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]
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were identified by ancient Babylonian astronomers in the 2nd millennium BC. [7] They were correctly identified as orbiting the Sun by Aristarchus of Samos, and later in Nicolaus Copernicus ' heliocentric system [8] (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 1543) Venus. 2nd Planet.
Simon Marius (latinized form of Simon Mayr; 10 January 1573 – 5 January 1625) [1] was a German astronomer. He was born in Gunzenhausen, near Nuremberg, but spent most of his life in the city of Ansbach. He is best known for being among the first observers of the four largest moons of Jupiter, and his publication of his discovery led to ...
Io is the innermost of the four moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo in January 1610. Rømer and Cassini refer to it as the "first satellite of Jupiter". It orbits Jupiter once every 42½ hours, and the plane of its orbit is very close to the plane of Jupiter's orbit around the sun.
Its diameter is eleven times that of Earth, and a tenth that of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm), with an orbital period of 11.86 years. It is the third brightest natural object in the Earth's night sky, after the Moon and Venus, and has been observed since prehistoric times.
Exploration of Io. Painting illustrating a flyby of Io by the Galileo spacecraft. The exploration of Io, Jupiter 's innermost Galilean and third-largest moon, began with its discovery in 1610 and continues today with Earth-based observations and visits by spacecraft to the Jupiter system. Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first to ...
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei (/ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ oʊ ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l eɪ /, US also / ˌ ɡ æ l ɪ ˈ l iː oʊ-/; Italian: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛːi]) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian (Florentine) [a] astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath.