Solar System Moons Facts
Solar System Moons Facts
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| Interesting Solar System Moons Facts: |
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| Galileo Galilei discovered that there were four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. Up until then humans had no idea that other moons existed in our solar system. |
| The earth's moon moderates the earth's wobble on its axis and helps to moderate a stable climate. |
| The earth's moon has a radius of 1,079.6 miles, which makes it less than one-third of the width of the earth. It is located about 238,855 miles from earth. IT gets about an inch further each year. |
| Jupiter has 53 moons that are named and 26 still waiting for their own names. Jupiter's four largest moons are named after Galileo - the Galilean Satellites. |
| The moons of Uranus are named after Shakespearean characters and from characters in the writings of Alexander Pope. |
| Uranus has 27 known moons. They are tiny and very black and located approximately 1.8 billion miles from the Sun. |
| Pluto has a wobble because its moon Charon is so large. It is believed that Pluto's moon system was created when a collision occurred in the early part of the solar system's history. |
| Pluto's other moons include Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx. |
| Mars has two moons. The largest is Phobos and Deimos. They are the smallest known to exist in our solar system. |
| Some of the moons in Saturn's orbit are shaped like food, including a sweet potato, a meatball, a sponge and a regular potato. |
| In total Saturn has more than 60 moons. Titan is its largest moon as well as being the second largest moon in our solar system. It is also known to have liquid collect on its surface. This makes Titan and Earth the only known places in our solar system to be capable of this. |
| Titan has liquid ethane and methane, which both rain down and fill lakes. |
| Triton, is Neptune's largest moon. It has ice volcanoes but it is so cold that the mixture instantly freezes and falls back to the surface as snow. Triton is considered to be one of the coldest of all objects in our solar system because it is gets so little sunlight and reflects what it does get. It is about -400 degrees Fahrenheit. |
| Neptune has 14 known moons including Nereid, Proteus, Triton, Thalassa, Despina and Galatea. Neso is so far from Neptune it takes it 26 years to orbit the planet only once. |
| There are moons in our solar system that are larger than Mercury, including Ganymede and Titan. |
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