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All of the rocky inner planets, as well as the moon, have an iron-dominant core. Venus and Mars have an additional major element in the core. Venus’ core is believed to be iron-nickel, similarly to Earth. Mars, on the other hand, is believed to have an iron-sulfur core and is separated into an outer liquid layer around an inner solid core. [20]
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 visible and near-infrared light, the rings have a reddish color, except the halo ring, which is neutral or blue in color. [3] The size of the dust in the rings varies, but the cross-sectional area is greatest for nonspherical particles of radius about 15 μm in all rings except the halo. [8] The halo ring is probably dominated by ...
The eight innermost regular moons, which have nearly circular orbits near the plane of Jupiter's equator, are thought to have formed alongside Jupiter, while the remainder are irregular moons and are thought to be captured asteroids or fragments of captured asteroids. The irregular moons within each group may have a common origin, perhaps as a ...
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 ...
As I wrote in that article, Jupiter’s main ring is primarily made of dust, and may be due to small particles impacting the two moons Metis and Adrastea; sunlight would push on the dust part
Some planetary rings are influenced by shepherd moons, small moons that orbit near the inner or outer edges of a ringlet or within gaps in the rings. The gravity of shepherd moons serves to maintain a sharply defined edge to the ring; material that drifts closer to the shepherd moon's orbit is either deflected back into the body of the ring ...
Scientists have figured out this is not necessarily true. In science class, we always learned that all the planets in our solar system orbit around the sun. Scientists have figured out this is not ...