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Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet, has no moons, or at least none that can be detected to a diameter of 1.6 km (1.0 mi). [2] For a very short time in 1974, Mercury was thought to have a moon. Venus also has no moons, [3] though reports of a moon around Venus have circulated since the 17th century.
Chiron, a moon of Saturn supposedly sighted by Hermann Goldschmidt in 1861 but never observed by anyone else.; Chrysalis, a hypothetical moon of Saturn, named in 2022 by scientists of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology using data from the Cassini–Huygens mission, thought to have been torn apart by Saturn's tidal forces, somewhere between 200 and 100 million years ago, with up to 99% ...
When discovered, Charon, the moon of Pluto, was found to be very large, leading to the declaration by many that the Pluto-Charon system was a double planet (binary planet). The 2006 IAU redefinition of planet excludes the possibility of double planets. [24] [25] [26] 15760 Albion: 1992 unknown Trans-Neptunian object
The second is that that planet's moon has to be on the same plane as the sun. RELATED: Solar eclipses Mercury and Venus have no moons so unfortunate for them, so they will never get to see an eclipse.
More bodies have been proposed, such as Salacia and (307261) 2002 MS 4 by Brown; Varuna and Ixion by Tancredi et al., and (532037) 2013 FY 27 by Sheppard et al. [66] Most of the larger bodies have moons, which enables a determination of their mass and thus their density, which inform estimates of whether they could be dwarf planets.
Largest moons to scale with their parent planets and dwarf planet. Besides planets and dwarf planets objects within our Solar System known to have natural satellites are 76 in the asteroid belt (five with two each), four Jupiter trojans, 39 near-Earth objects (two with two satellites each), and 14 Mars-crossers. [2]
Irregular moons often have large, eccentric orbits that don't neatly circle the object's equator. Most irregular moons are thought to be "captured," meaning that got tangled up in the orbits of ...
The number of dwarf planets in the Solar System is unknown. Estimates have run as high as 200 in the Kuiper belt [1] and over 10,000 in the region beyond. [2] However, consideration of the surprisingly low densities of many large trans-Neptunian objects, as well as spectroscopic analysis of their surfaces, suggests that the number of dwarf planets may be much lower, perhaps only nine among ...