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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]
All of Jupiter's satellites from XXXIV onward are named after descendants of Jupiter or Zeus, [50] except LIII , named after a lover of Jupiter. Names ending with "a" or "o" are used for prograde irregular satellites (the latter for highly inclined satellites), and names ending with "e" are used for retrograde irregulars. [28]
Searches for more satellites have been unsuccessful, putting the maximum radius of any other satellites at 90 m (100 yd). [4] Jupiter has 95 moons with known orbits; 72 of them have received permanent designations, and 57 have been named. Its eight regular moons are grouped into the planet-sized Galilean moons and the far smaller Amalthea group ...
Kowal, despite suggesting a name for Jupiter XIII, was of the opinion that Jupiter's irregular satellites should not be named at all. [13] Carl Sagan noted that the names chosen were extraordinarily obscure (a fact that Tobias Owen , chair of the Task Group, admitted was intentional in a response to Sagan [ 10 ] ) and suggested his own names in ...
The seven largest natural satellites in the Solar System (those bigger than 2,500 km across) are Jupiter's Galilean moons (Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa), Saturn's moon Titan, Earth's moon, and Neptune's captured natural satellite Triton. Triton, the smallest of these, has more mass than all smaller natural satellites together.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) reserves names for moons of Jupiter ending in -a (Leda, Himalia and so on) for the moons in this group to indicate prograde motions of these bodies relative to Jupiter, their gravitationally central object.
Following the discovery of moons of Saturn, a naming system based on that of Kepler and Marius was used for Jupiter's moons. [27] Ganymede is the only Galilean moon of Jupiter named after a male figure—like Io, Europa, and Callisto, he was a lover of Zeus. In English, the Galilean satellites Io, Europa and Callisto have the Latin spellings of ...
S/2003 J 12 is a natural satellite of Jupiter, and is one of the smallest known natural satellites in the Solar System.It was discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii led by Scott S. Sheppard in 2003.