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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 Galilean moons are by far the largest and most massive objects to orbit Jupiter, with the remaining 91 known moons and the rings together comprising just 0.003% of the total orbiting mass. Of Jupiter 's moons, eight are regular satellites with prograde and nearly circular orbits that are not greatly inclined with respect to Jupiter's ...
The discoveries of Io and the other Galilean satellites of Jupiter were published in Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius in March 1610. [1] While the Jovian moons he discovered would later be known as the Galilean satellites, after himself, he proposed the name Medicea Sidera (Medicean Stars) after his new patrons, the de'Medici family of his native ...
It's easy for Hubble to take pictures of Jupiter or its moons, but it only gets the chance to capture the planet on cam with three visible Galilean satellites once or twice a decade. That's what ...
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.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured images of three of Jupiter's largest moons -- Callisto, Io, and Europa -- crossing the planet's face in the same frame, an occurrence that only happens once ...
Callisto is the outermost of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter. It orbits at a distance of approximately 1,880,000 km (26.3 times the 71,492 km radius of Jupiter itself). [3] This is significantly larger than the orbital radius—1,070,000 km—of the next-closest Galilean satellite, Ganymede.
The orbit of Io is also slightly irregular because of orbital resonance with Europa and Ganymede, two of the other Galilean moons of Jupiter, but this would not be fully explained for another century. The only solution available to Cassini and to other astronomers of his time was to issue periodic corrections to the tables of eclipses of Io to ...