Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The distinction between a satellite and a classical planet was not recognized until after the heliocentric model of the Solar System was established. When in 1610 Galileo discovered the first satellites of another planet (the four Galilean moons of Jupiter), he referred to them as "four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness."
Uranus, the seventh planet of the Solar System, has 28 confirmed moons. The 27 with names are named after characters that appear in, or are mentioned in, William Shakespeare's plays and Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of the Lock. [1] Uranus's moons are divided into three groups: thirteen inner moons, five major moons, and ten irregular moons.
The radii of these objects range over three orders of magnitude, from planetary-mass objects like dwarf planets and some moons to the planets and the Sun. This list does not include small Solar System bodies , but it does include a sample of possible planetary-mass objects whose shapes have yet to be determined.
Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn and the 18th-largest in the Solar System. It is about 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter, [5] about a tenth of that of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It is mostly covered by fresh, clean ice, making it one of the most reflective bodies of the Solar System.
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]
An annotated picture of some of Neptune's many moons as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. The bright blue diffraction star is Triton, Neptune's largest moon; while Hippocamp, its smallest regular moon, is too small to be seen. The planet Neptune has 16 known moons, which are named for minor water deities and a water creature in Greek ...
Triton is the largest natural satellite of the planet Neptune. It is the only moon of Neptune massive enough to be rounded under its own gravity and hosts a thin, hazy atmosphere. Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde orbit—revolving in the opposite direction to the parent planet's rotation—the only large moon in the Solar System to do so.
Puck—the largest inner moon of Uranus—was discovered from the images taken by Voyager 2 on 30 December 1985. It was given the temporary designation S/1985 U 1. [11]The moon was later named after the character Puck who appears in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a little sprite who travels around the globe at night with the fairies.