Jupiter has at least 63 moons, with the Galilean moons being the most famous and largest. They provided evidence against the heliocentric theory. Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, Callisto has an old surface, Europa has an icy crust hiding an ocean, and Io is volcanically active. Voyager probes took close-up images of the moons. Jupiter has more confirmed moons than any other planet in the Solar System, with 63 in total.
Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System and fifth from the Sun, has at least sixty-three moons. The most famous and by far the largest are the Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, discovered by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610 with his 32X magnifying telescope.
Observation of the Galilean moons has provided crucial evidence that celestial bodies may be orbiting something other than the Earth, providing a blow to the heliocentric theory of the Solar System. In 1611, Galileo even took his telescope to Rome to show the moons to the influential philosophers and mathematicians of the Roman Jesuit College, but despite this, he was approached for his radical ideas for the next decade and finally placed under house arrest by the Inquisition .
Even today, when sixty-three satellites of Jupiter are known, the Galilean satellites remain among the most beautiful, unique and widely studied. There is Ganymede, at 5262 km in diameter, the largest moon in the Solar System, also slightly larger than the planet Mercury. Callisto, with one of the oldest surfaces in the Solar System, pockmarked with numerous craters and gnarled terrain. Europa – whose icy crust hides a deep underlying water ocean that is one of the most likely areas in the Solar System to host extraterrestrial life. I, a yellow pockmarked moon that looks like a pizza, the only volcanically active body in the Solar System apart from Earth and Venus.
Fantastic close-up images of these moons were taken by the Voyager space probes during their flybys in the late 1970s. It was a Voyager spacecraft that originally discovered volcanism on Io, observing a plume reaching hundreds of miles above the planet’s surface.
It was not until 1892, hundreds of years later, that another of Jupiter’s moons, the irregularly shaped Amalthea, about 250 km long, was discovered. Between 1892 and 1975, eight more moons were discovered. When Voyager probes visited Jupiter, three new inner moons were discovered, bringing the total to 16. It remained at 16 until 1999, and since then 47 more moons have been discovered, bringing the total to 63. Most of these moons are very small, with an average diameter of 3 km, and travel in long, eccentric orbits. These are called irregular satellites and are thought to be mainly captured asteroids by Jupiter.
Jupiter is the planet with the most confirmed moons of all those in the Solar System, its 63 moons beat Saturn’s 60.
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