# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged natural-satellites

76

As planets get farther from the Sun, the Sun takes up a smaller part of the sky. The Sun is about 31 arc-minutes when viewed from Earth, but just 6-7 from Jupiter and 3-4 from Saturn. Less than 2 from Uranus and about 1 arc-minute from Neptune, not much bigger than Venus appears from Earth when Venus is visibly large in the sky and when Venus transits the ...

48

It’s because they are much smaller than Io. Tidal forces are differential forces, that is, they result from the difference in gravitational pull on one side of a body compared to the other. When an object is small, the difference in distance to the two sides of it is necessarily small as well. According to Wikipedia, Amalthea, the largest of those four ...

44

In the extreme energy of a large impact, the rock behaves like a liquid (It isn't actually completely melted, though some is. The extreme forces cause the rock to flow). As the impactor hits the moon, rock is pushed out, and since it is surrounded by relatively solid rock, it is pushed up. Then gravity takes over as the rock that has been pushed up now ...

38

Liquid water can't exist in a vacuum. If there is no pressure, then the boiling point will drop to the freezing point and so there will either be ice or water vapour. And if the world is "small" then its gravity won't hold on to any water vapour, and it will be lost to space. The Earth can have liquid water because its gravity is strong enough to ...

27

I don't think there are any in the Solar system. We do have around 250 asteroids with moons. Rhea's ring seems to be the only exception. Edit: Originally I said "a moon with a moon would be an unstable system, due to the gravitational influence of the planet." @Florian disagrees with this. However, the answer is more complex than the Hill sphere alone. ...

24

The answer to the headline question is: No. Most of Saturn's rings are below the Roche limit of about 2.5 Saturn radii. Hence tidal forces will prevent that part of the rings to form a (large) moon. Actually, part of the rings may be caused by loss of material from some of Saturn's moons, as suspected from observations of Enceladus. Accretion of Earth is ...

23

Mass. The more massive a body, the larger the gap between its lowest and highest orbit; the range of speeds at which a random body entering its gravity is likely to remain as its satellite. Sun has millions of satellites if you count all the asteroids; smaller planets tend to have one or two moons at most (Pluto with five being a notable and not fully ...

23

Yes. Charon is in Pluto synchronous orbit. Pluto and Charon are mutually tide locked.

23

Pan, Daphnis, and various other moonlets, I would argue, are inside the rings. If you explicitly discount the Encke gap (which Pan orbits in) and the Keeler gap (which Daphnis orbits in) as being part of the ring system, Daphnis would be your answer, as it is a ~8 km object in a 42 km gap. (for comparison, Pan is a ~35 km object in a 325 km gap) Really, ...

20

Of course, a natural satellite (moon) could have an orbital period equal to the spin period of its host (provided such an orbit would be accessible). However, the tidal friction that may generate such a locking is quite weak, so this would have to be a rare chance. Moreover, perturbations to the orbit from other moons or their host star may put the moon out ...

20

Per the Carnegie Science article that Magic Octopus Urn linked from NASA in the comments, a Carnegie Science team led by Scott S. Sheppard noticed something new in spring of 2017 (though some observations occurred as early as 2016). It took a year to confirm the discovery of the new moons. Ten of the moons orbit in the outer swarm of moons, which is one of ...

20

There are several factors determining the inner limit to moons. Perhaps the simplest is that it needs to stay inside the Hill sphere, the region around the planet where the planet's gravity dominates over the sun's. If the planet's orbit has semi-major axis $a$ and eccentricity $e$ the farthest the moon can orbit is $$r_H \approx a(1-e)\sqrt[3]{\frac{m}{3M}}... 19 The answer is Yes.. Planets that don't orbit around a star are known as Rogue Planets. There is nothing preventing a rogue planet from having one or many moons. Not so long ago, the first candidate for a free-floating exoplanet-exomoon system was presented in this paper. It looks like a gas giant several times larger than Jupiter with a sub-Earth mass moon.... 19 In 2006 the IAU had a trilemma. They could decide that Eris was a planet, and potentially allow for future discoveries of tens of new planets. They could be inconsistent, declare that Pluto was a planet, but Eris (and Ceres) wasn't They could come up with a definition of "planet" that would exclude Eris, and consequently also exclude Pluto. Each option ... 18 There is a prior answer here claiming that "a moon with a moon would be an unstable system". That is incorrect. Intuitively: Of course satellites can have satellites with long-term stable orbits. Think of the Earth orbiting the Sun, and the Moon orbiting the Earth. The orbit of the Moon (a satellite's satellite) is long-term stable. More rigorously: The ... 18 Bigger is better. Most moons, especially those of gas giants, are not "formed", they are just "captured" (unlike our Moon, which could have been captured, but probably was formed in a much more exciting way). Jupiter is the most massive planet in the solar system. It stands to reason that it has a larger region of gravitational influence (where its ... 17 There are four moons that are closer to Jupiter than Io with higher eccentricities, yet they don't seem to have any volcanism at their surface. Only one of those innermost moons (Thebe) has an eccentricity higher than that of Io. The other three have lower eccentricities. The reason they don't exhibit volcanism is because they are too small. The largest of ... 15 Not an answer, but I thought this was a good slice of a picture of the Moon's orbit around the sun. Source: http://www.wired.com/2012/12/does-the-moon-orbit-the-sun-or-the-earth/ 15 This questions can be split in two; for planets and satellites. The diversity of planets reflects in part the diversity in terms of chemical composition of the protoplanetary disk. We know that UV radiation from the sun can dissociate complex molecules or even very simple ones; for example, when UV rays split water molecules the result is free hydrogen and ... 15 Do celestial objects need to be big to have liquid water on their surfaces? Yes. In a nutshell: liquid surface water needs an atmosphere. To sustain an atmosphere, a planet must be sufficiently massive, therefore sufficiently large. The warmer a planet, the more mass it needs to sustain an atmosphere. A planet warm enough for liquid water must thus also ... 14 @Arne is right in his answer about two things, that the most suitable frequency for Jovian amateur radio is 20.1 MHz, and that this is a 15 meter wavelength. However, the antenna can actually be half the wavelength, and amateur radio astronomers have had good results listening to all kinds of Jovian sounds, including detecting occultations of its many moons ... 14 There is one known pair of moons in the solar system that seemingly swap orbits every couple of years. That's Saturn's Epimetheus and Janus. Their orbits are so close together that they interact gravitationally every couple of years (when the inner moon catches up to the outer moon), so that the outer moon is slowed down, and the inner moon is accelerated. ... 14 The strength of the Earth's gravitational field compared to the Moon and the Sun is not enough to capture and hold satellites - there are too many disruptive forces that would rip them away over time. However there are some objects at the Lagrangian points - the points where the gravitational fields of the Earth and other objects are equal and so it is ... 14 There are three main formation scenarios for planetary moons. The giant impact hypothesis: The satellite forms as a consecuence of an impact between the planet an a large planetesimal. The Moon is an example, and one of the arguments is that the chemical composition of the Moon matches that of Earth with a significant accuracy suggesting that it is a in ... 13 It's theoretically possible for moons of moons to exist in stable orbits, gravitationally speaking. However, as far as I'm aware, no natural moons of moons have ever been observed as of yet. (Incidentally, there's a list of proposed terms for moons of moons, the most popular of which seem to be "submoon" and "moonmoon".) There's a 2018 paper that explores ... 13 How can a planet capture a moon? There are 178 moons in the Solar System, according to the NASA Planetary Fact Sheet, so it seems to be a common event. The following sections will show that moon capture is actually unlikely, but when a planet has one or more moons capture becomes easier. Initial Conditions Starting from the initial conditions, the planet ... 13 Uranus rotates once every 0.718 days. 11 of its satellites have a shorter orbital period. These are inner satellites of Uranus which are roughly in the equatorial plane of Uranus. I don't quite understand what direction they orbit in compared to the direction in which Uranus spins. Neptune rotates once every 0.671 days. 5 of its satellites have a shorter ... 13 This question has been asked before on the Space Exploration page. In summary, the term used is system, e.g. the 'Jupiter system'. 12 Hill sphere is the region of space around a satellite where the satellite wins the gravitational tug-of-war with its primary. If the mass of the primary object is M, mass of the satellite is m, semi-major axis of satellite is a, and eccentricity of the orbit of the satellite is e, then the radius r of the Hill sphere for satellite is given by:$$ ...

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