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Among the other dwarf planets, Ceres has no known moons. It is 90 percent certain that Ceres has no moons larger than 1 km in size, assuming that they would have the same albedo as Ceres itself. [6] Eris has one large known moon, Dysnomia. Accurately determining its size is difficult: one indicative estimate of its radius is 350 ± 57.5 km. [7]
Pluto (bottom left) compared in size to the Earth and the Moon. Pluto's diameter is 2 376.6 ± 3.2 km [5] and its mass is (1.303 ± 0.003) × 10 22 kg, 17.7% that of the Moon (0.22% that of Earth). [128] Its surface area is 1.774 443 × 10 7 km 2, or just slightly bigger than Russia or Antarctica (particularly including the Antarctic sea ice ...
Charon has an angular diameter of 4 degrees of arc as seen from the surface of Pluto; the Sun appears much smaller, only 39 to 65 arcseconds. By comparison, the Moon as viewed from Earth has an angular diameter of only 31 minutes of arc, or just over half a degree of arc. Therefore, Charon would appear to have eight times the diameter, or 25 ...
Of the inner planets, Mercury and Venus have no natural satellites; Earth has one large natural satellite, known as the Moon; and Mars has two tiny natural satellites, Phobos and Deimos. The giant planets have extensive systems of natural satellites, including half a dozen comparable in size to Earth's Moon: the four Galilean moons , Saturn's ...
Frequently described as a planet-like moon, Titan is 50% larger in diameter than Earth's Moon and 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System after Jupiter's Ganymede and is larger than Mercury ; yet Titan is only 40% as massive as Mercury, because Mercury is mainly iron and rock while much of Titan is ice, which is less ...
The concept of satellite planets – the idea that all planetary-mass objects, including moons, are planets – is used by some planetary scientists, such as Alan Stern, who are more concerned with whether a celestial body has planetary geology (that is, whether it is a planetary body) than its solar or non-solar orbit (planetary dynamics). [1]
Simulation work published in 2005 by Robin Canup suggested that Charon could have been formed by a collision around 4.5 billion years ago, much like Earth and the Moon. In this model, a large Kuiper belt object struck Pluto at high velocity, destroying itself and blasting off much of Pluto's outer mantle , and Charon coalesced from the debris ...
The English proper name for Earth's natural satellite is typically written as Moon, with a capital M. [19] [20] The noun moon is derived from Old English mōna, which stems from Proto-Germanic *mēnōn, [21] which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European *mēnsis 'month' [22] (from earlier *mēnōt, genitive *mēneses) which may be related to the verb 'measure' (of time).