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Like Saturn's largest moon Titan, it is larger than the planet Mercury, but has somewhat less surface gravity than Mercury, Io, or the Moon due to its lower density compared to the three. [18] Ganymede orbits Jupiter in roughly seven days and is in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io , respectively.
For example, Titan looks bigger than Ganymede, but its solid body is smaller. For the giant planets , the "radius" is defined as the distance from the center at which the atmosphere reaches 1 bar of atmospheric pressure.
Compared to the craters of similarly sized and structured Ganymede and Callisto, those of Titan are much shallower. Many have dark floors of sediment; geomorphological analysis of impact craters largely suggests that erosion and burial are the primary mechanisms of crater modification.
All four, along with Titan, Triton, and Earth's Moon, are larger than any of the Solar System's dwarf planets. 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 ...
Two moons in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan, are larger than the planet Mercury, and a third, Callisto, is just slightly smaller than it, although all three are less massive. Additionally, seven – Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Luna, Europa, and Triton – are larger and more massive than the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris.
Three moons are particularly notable. Titan is the second-largest moon in the Solar System (after Jupiter's Ganymede), with a nitrogen-rich Earth-like atmosphere and a landscape featuring river networks and hydrocarbon lakes. [6] Enceladus emits jets of ice from its south-polar region and is covered in a deep layer of snow. [7]
NASA's Galileo ' s measurements suggest that large moons can have magnetic fields; it found Ganymede has its own magnetosphere, even though its mass is only 2.5% of Earth's. [18] Alternatively, the moon's atmosphere may be constantly replenished by gases from subsurface sources, as thought by some scientists to be the case with Titan. [21]
In the Solar System it is the third-largest moon after Ganymede and Saturn's largest moon Titan, and nearly as large as the smallest planet Mercury. Callisto is, with a diameter of 4,821 km , roughly a third larger than Earth's Moon and orbits Jupiter on average at a distance of 1,883,000 km , which is about five times further out than the Moon ...