# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged natural-satellites

75

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 ...

26

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. ...

25

No. One explanation for the equatorial ridge on Iapetus involves a now-lost subsatellite, so perhaps such objects existed in our Solar System's past. Subsatellites tend to get rapidly removed by tidal forces causing changes to the orbit. Depending on the parameters of the system, the orbit may decay until the subsatellite collides with the moon or breaks up ...

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 ...

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

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....

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 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 ...

13

@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 ...

13

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. ...

13

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 ...

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

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 ...

12

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 ...

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:  ...

12

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/

11

The currently leading answer is correct to say that moon formation inside the Roche limit is unlikely. However, the disk is evolving due to viscosity between the particles, and as a consequence it "spreads", so that material is able to move to outside the Roche limit. In fact this is a leading possible explanation for the formation of the inner moons of ...

11

How can tidal heating lower Io's orbit? It doesn't, at least not to first order. The first order effect is that tidal heating acts to circularize Io's orbit. Counter to that, orbital resonances with Europa and Ganymede act to make Io's orbit more elliptical. This leads to a nice hysteresis loop. Suppose Io is in a fairly circular orbit. This results in ...

11

Unlike "planet" the IAU hasn't attempted to precisely define "moon". General usage requires that a "moon" is a natural satellite of a planet (or dwarf planet, asteroid, or perhaps even of another moon?) and it is big enough for us to have seen it as an independent body. This contrasts with the "moonlets" that have been detected in Saturn's rings by their ...

10

What is the reason for this difference between assumed and actual path variation? Even your second image isn't correct. Imagine zooming in on a small portion of the Moon's orbit about the Sun, for example, one full moon to the next, with the Sun zoomed out of the picture. Now imagine drawing a line segment from one outer cusp (full moon) to the next. In ...

10

Singling out one point: Moons must have "cleared the neighbourhood" of their own orbit, i.e. in their particular orbit around the host they are by far the most massive body This would mean that co-orbital moons won't exist anymore; e.g. Telesto and Calypso share their orbit around Saturn with the much more massive Tethys. With the proposed ...

10

Since the question has sit unanswered for months, I'm trying to give an acknowledgedly incomplete answer. In summary: By 1700 it would have been a reasonable guess. By 1800 it was becoming an observed trend. TL;DR: It's hard to decide when the consensus was created on the typical orbits of satellites, because there are only a few data points (planets with ...

9

Mathematically, the motion of the Pluto-Charon system can be decomposed into two parts: The motion of Pluto-Charon about the Sun, and the motion of Pluto and Charon about one another. If one sets the reference point to be the center of Pluto, the path the Pluto-Charon system would appear to follow about the Sun would be an epicycle, which is a far more ...

9

This is due to the mechanics of capture. For one object (moon) to be captured by a another (planet), some energy has to be removed from the system. If the incoming moon has an existing satellite then it would be ejected, carrying a lot of kinetic energy. If a small body were to be captured by the planet/moon combination, it would usually be captured by ...

8

This is a fun question, so I spend some time thinking about it. This is what I came up with. Is this possible? Yes, this is certainly possible. Just consider the Solar System itself. We have a massive central body, the Sun, and several tiny subsystems (planets with their moons) orbiting it. Is it stable? Again, from the simple observation that the ...

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