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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]
U.S. customary. ≈ 4.1847 × 1027 pounds. The Jupiter mass, also called Jovian mass, is the unit of mass equal to the total mass of the planet Jupiter. This value may refer to the mass of the planet alone, or the mass of the entire Jovian system to include the moons of Jupiter. Jupiter is by far the most massive planet in the Solar System.
The four giant planets of the Solar System: (top) Jupiter and Saturn (gas giants) (bottom) Uranus and Neptune (ice giants) Shown in order from the Sun and in true color. Sizes are not to scale. A giant planet, sometimes referred to as a jovian planet (Jove being another name for the Roman god Jupiter), is a diverse type of planet much larger ...
The largest, Ganymede, is the largest moon in the Solar System and surpasses the planet Mercury in size (though not mass). Callisto is only slightly smaller than Mercury in size; the smaller ones, Io and Europa, are about the size of the Moon. The three inner moons — Io, Europa, and Ganymede — are in a 4:2:1 orbital resonance with
3-hour timelapse showing rotation of Jupiter and orbital motion of the moons. Jupiter is the only planet whose barycentre with the Sun lies outside the volume of the Sun, though by only 7% of the Sun's radius. [135] [136] The average distance between Jupiter and the Sun is 778 million km (5.2 AU) and it completes an orbit every 11.86 years.
Saturn's satellite system is very lopsided: one moon, Titan, comprises more than 96% of the mass in orbit around the planet. The six other planemo (ellipsoidal) moons constitute roughly 4% of the mass, and the remaining small moons, together with the rings, comprise only 0.04%. [b]
The four outer planets, called giant planets or Jovian planets, collectively make up 99% of the mass known to orbit the Sun. [h] All four giant planets have multiple moons and a ring system, although only Saturn's rings are easily observed from Earth. [91]
The rings of Jupiter are a system of faint planetary rings. The Jovian rings were the third ring system to be discovered in the Solar System, after those of Saturn and Uranus. The main ring was discovered in 1979 by the Voyager 1 space probe [1] and the system was more thoroughly investigated in the 1990s by the Galileo orbiter. [2]