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An annotated picture of Saturn's many moons captured by the Cassini spacecraft. Shown in the image are Dione, Enceladus, Epimetheus, Prometheus, Mimas, Rhea, Janus, Tethys and Titan. The moons of Saturn are numerous and diverse, ranging from tiny moonlets only tens of meters across to the enormous Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury.
The Moon orbiting around Earth (observed by the Deep Space Climate Observatory) A natural satellite is, in the most common usage, an astronomical body that orbits a planet, dwarf planet, or small Solar System body (or sometimes another natural satellite). Natural satellites are colloquially referred to as moons, a derivation from the Moon of Earth.
Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3] The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site has been known to host copyrighted content .
Of the Solar System's eight planets and its nine most likely dwarf planets, six planets and seven dwarf planets are known to be orbited by at least 300 natural satellites, or moons. At least 19 of them are large enough to be gravitationally rounded; of these, all are covered by a crust of ice except for Earth's Moon and Jupiter's Io. [1]
The regular moons of Neptune are likely examples of this, as the capture of Neptune's largest moon—Triton—would have severely disrupted the existing primordial moon system. Once Triton was tidally dampened into a lower-eccentricity orbit, the debris resulting from the disruption of the primordial moons re-accreted into the current regular ...
The atmosphere of Titan is the dense layer of gases surrounding Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.Titan is the only natural satellite of a planet in the Solar System with an atmosphere that is denser than the atmosphere of Earth and is one of two moons with an atmosphere significant enough to drive weather (the other being the atmosphere of Triton). [4]
The Moon, Io and Earth shown to scale. Although significantly smaller, some of the Solar System's moons and dwarf planets share similarities to Earth's density and temperature. The index can be calculated for objects other than planets, including natural satellites, dwarf planets and asteroids. The lower average density and temperature of these ...
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second-largest in the Solar System.It is the only moon known to have an atmosphere denser than the Earth's and is the only known object in space—other than Earth—on which there is clear evidence that stable bodies of liquid exist.