You already know about our moon right? It’s the big thing in the sky when you look up at night. Of course, you already knew that. Well, in this list we’re not just focusing on our moon. We’re going to be talking about all the moons in our Solar System. And there are a lot of them. Depending on how you count, you would come up to almost 200 moons. For our purposes we can say that there are 181 natural satellites in orbit around planets and dwarf planets around our sun. In fact, 19 of them are large enough to be gravitationally rounded. Basically this means that if they were directly orbiting the sun they themselves would be considered to be either planets or dwarf planets. The first moons that were discovered apart from our own moon were the Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter. They were discovered in 1610 by…big surprise…Galileo Galilei! It wasn’t until the Voyager 1 and 2 missions in the 1970s that a large number of other moons were detected. Since the year 2000, new telescope technology has also allowed for the detection of many more moons. These are 25 little known facts about the moons in our Solar System!
Featured Image: pixabay
Saturn's moon Enceladus has fountains that shoot large jets of water into space. According to NASA it seems like one of the most hospitable places in our Solar System outside of Earth
Source: wikipedia, Image: Kevin Gill via Flickr Besides Charon, Pluto actually has 4 other moons that rotate chaotically on their axis. They were most likely formed during a collision a long time ago.
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Saturn's moons Epimetheus and Janus are co-orbital which means they share orbits. They avoid crashing into each other, however, due to mutual acceleration and deceleration because of gravity
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Ganymede and Titan are two of the largest moons in our Solar System. In fact, they are both bigger than Mercury
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Neso is Neptune's most distant moon. It is so far that it takes 26 years to orbit Neptune once
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Phobos, one of Mars's moons, appears to rise/fall in the sky two times every day. This is because it orbits faster than Mars rotates!
Source: wikipedia, Image: Kevin Gill via Flickr Neptune's largest moon, Triton, has geysers that shoot materials nearly 5 miles into the atmosphere
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Jupiter's moon Europa hold's more water than Earth. It's sub-surface oceans could be as deep as 170km
Source: nasa.gov, Image: wikipedia Jupiter has 67 moons. That is the most out of any planet
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Saturn's moon Lapetus has a ring around its equator that is nearly 13 km higher than the surrounding land (it looks like a walnut)
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Saturn's moon Rhea may have its own rings. If so, these would be the first rings found on a moon anywhere in the universe
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Saturn's moon Mimas looks like the Death Star and its heat signature resembles Pac-Man
Source: wikipedia, Image: Paul T. via Flickr Deimos, Mars's smallest moon, has an escape velocity of 5.2 m/s. This means that if you ran and jumped you could launch yourself off of it.
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Neptune's gravity will one day destroy its moon Triton. This will give Neptune a ring similar to Saturn
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Mars's moons are named Phobos and Deimos. In Latin this means "fear" and "panic"
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Mountains on Titan are named after mountains in the Lord of Rings trilogy by JR Tolkien
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia NASA crashed its Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter in order to protect Europa, one of Jupiter's moons that is believed to potentially harbor life
Source: enterprisemission.com, Image: wikipedia Saturn's moon Titan has an atmosphere that is so thick and gravity that is so low that you could "fly" through it.
Source: wikipedia, Image: pixabay Danish astronomer Ole Roemer first calculated the speed of light in the 1670s by observing the orbit of Jupiter's moon Io.
Source: colorado.edu, Image: wikipedia For the last 41 years, there hasn't been anybody on our moon
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Pluto is technically part of a "binary system" with its moon Charon. This basically means that neither body is orbiting the other. They are both orbiting each other
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia There are more than 330 moons in the Solar System. 168 of them orbit planets. None of them belong to Venus or Mercury.
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia When the sun becomes a red giant, Titan may become warm enough to support life for several hundred million years
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia The New Horizons spacecraft on its way to Pluto is carrying a Florida state quarter because it has a space theme
Source: collectspace.com, Image: wikipedia Jupiter's moon Io is the most geologically active object in the Solar System (lots of volcanoes)
Source: wikipedia, Image: wikipedia Lists Going Viral Right Now
