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The Galilean moons are named after Galileo Galilei, who observed them in either December 1609 or January 1610, and recognized them as satellites of Jupiter in March 1610; [2] they remained the only known moons of Jupiter until the discovery of the fifth largest moon of Jupiter Amalthea in 1892. [3]
The first were Pioneer 10 in 1973, and Pioneer 11 a year later, taking low-resolution images of the four Galilean moons and returning data on their atmospheres and radiation belts. [74] The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes visited Jupiter in 1979, discovering the volcanic activity on Io and the presence of water ice on the surface of Europa .
Io (/ ˈ aɪ. oʊ /), or Jupiter I, is the innermost and second-smallest of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter.Slightly larger than Earth's moon, Io is the fourth-largest moon in the Solar System, has the highest density of any moon, the strongest surface gravity of any moon, and the lowest amount of water by atomic ratio of any known astronomical object in the Solar System.
1 Images and size comparison of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. Toggle the table of contents. Wikipedia: ...
Explore Our Solar System's Most Mysterious Moons Popular Mechanics; NASA, Getty Images. ... Because it is the closest Galilean moon to Jupiter and passes through the planet’s magnetic field, Io ...
Ganymede is the only Galilean moon of Jupiter named after a male figure—like Io, Europa, and Callisto, he was a lover of Zeus. In English, the Galilean satellites Io, Europa and Callisto have the Latin spellings of their names, but the Latin form of Ganymede is Ganymēdēs, which would be pronounced / ˌ ɡ æ n ɪ ˈ m iː d iː z /. [38]
This discovery image shows the new Uranian moon S/2023 U1 using the Magellan telescope on November 4, 2023. Uranus (upper left) is just off the field of view.
The images returned during the approach revealed a strange, multi-colored landscape devoid of impact craters, unlike the other planetary surfaces imaged to that point such as the Moon, Mars, and Mercury. [1] The dark spots in earlier images resembled volcanic calderas more than they did the impact craters seen on those other worlds. [47]