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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]
The habitability of natural satellites is the potential of moons to provide habitats for life, though it is not an indicator that they harbor it.Natural satellites are expected to outnumber planets by a large margin and the study of their habitability is therefore important to astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial life.
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]
NASA is set to launch a spacecraft to Jupiter's moon Europa, considered one of our solar system's most promising spots to search for life beyond Earth, to learn whether this ice-encased world ...
At 16:06 GMT, NASA launched the Europa Clipper ship from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to search for signs of life on one of Jupiter’s frozen moons. “Discovering life on other celestial bodies ...
The James Webb Space Telescope has detected carbon, a building block of life, on the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
Europa / j ʊ ˈ r oʊ p ə / ⓘ, or Jupiter II, is the smallest of the four Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter, and the sixth-closest to the planet of all the 95 known moons of Jupiter. It is also the sixth-largest moon in the Solar System .
Europa, the superstar among Jupiter’s many moons. One of Jupiter’s 95 known moons, Europa is almost the size of our own moon. It's encased in an ice sheet estimated to be 10 miles to 15 miles or more (15 kilometers to 24 kilometers) thick. Scientists believe this frozen crust hides an ocean that could be 80 miles (120 kilometers) or more deep.