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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]
The eight innermost regular moons, which have nearly circular orbits near the plane of Jupiter's equator, are thought to have formed alongside Jupiter, while the remainder are irregular moons and are thought to be captured asteroids or fragments of captured asteroids. The irregular moons within each group may have a common origin, perhaps as a ...
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. They were named after lovers of Zeus, the Greek equivalent of Jupiter.
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]
Although Himalia is the sixth-largest moon of Jupiter, it is the fifth-most massive. Amalthea is only a few km bigger, but less massive. Resolved images of Himalia by Cassini have led to a size estimate of 150 km × 120 km (93 mi × 75 mi), while ground-based estimates suggest that Himalia is large, with a diameter around 170 km (110 mi).
Jupiter has surpassed Saturn with the record for the planet with the most moons in our solar system. The gas giant has a total of 92 confirmed moons, according to new observations by astronomers.
Jupiter may be best known as the planetary titan of our solar system with a comparatively small red mark — that still dwarfs the entirety of Earth — and rows of striations going from pole to pole.
In modern times, numerous impact events on Jupiter have been observed, the most significant of which was the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1994. Jupiter is the most massive planet in the Solar System and thus has a vast sphere of gravitational influence, the region of space where an asteroid capture can take place under favorable ...