Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The sizes and masses of many of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are fairly well known due to numerous observations and interactions of the Galileo and Cassini orbiters; however, many of the moons with a radius less than ~100 km, such as Jupiter's Himalia, have far less certain masses. [5]
Of the Solar System's eight planets and its nine most likely dwarf planets, six planets and seven dwarf planets are known to be orbited by at least 300 natural satellites, or moons. At least 19 of them are large enough to be gravitationally rounded; of these, all are covered by a crust of ice except for Earth's Moon and Jupiter's Io. [1]
These moons all orbit beyond the E Ring. They are: Rhea is the second-largest of Saturn's moons. It is even slightly larger than Oberon, the second-largest moon of Uranus. [53] In 2005, Cassini detected a depletion of electrons in the plasma wake of Rhea, which forms when the co-rotating plasma of Saturn's magnetosphere is absorbed by the moon ...
One moon, Triton, makes up nearly all of the mass of the system, with all other moons together comprising only one third of one percent. This is similar to the moon system of Saturn, where Titan makes up more than 95% of the total mass, but is different from the more balanced systems of Jupiter and Uranus. The reason for the lopsidedness of the ...
This page was last edited on 7 February 2021, at 17:58 (UTC).; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License; additional terms may apply.
The usual English proper name for Earth's natural satellite is simply Moon, with a capital M. [19] [20] The noun moon is derived from Old English mōna, which (like all its Germanic cognates) 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).
[12] [22] All of the inner moons are intimately connected with the rings of Uranus, which probably resulted from the fragmentation of one or several small inner moons. [23] The two innermost moons, Cordelia and Ophelia, are shepherds of Uranus's ε ring, whereas the small moon Mab is a source of Uranus's outermost μ ring. [12]
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]