Moons

Blogs about natural satellites

Image of Io taken by the North telescope of the Gemini Observatory that shows the vulcanic activity in August 2013 (Image Katherine de Kleer/UC Berkeley/Gemini Observatory)

Io, the innermost of the Jupiter’s large satellites called the Galilean moons because they were discovered by Galileo Galilei, is the object with the greatest geological activity in the solar system with over 400 active volcanoes. Now new images of Io have been published from almost exactly a year ago, when there were two weeks of activity intense even by the standards of Io, with three massive eruptions.

Part of Saturn's ring showing the disturbance at their outer edge caused by Peggy (Photo NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

The Cassini space probe has detected an object at the edge of the planet Saturn’s outermost ring, the one called ring A, that could be a new moon. Informally called Peggy, it may be just forming, a small block of ice with a diameter of less than one kilometer (about half a mile) detectable only by the slight gravitational disturbance that caused on the ring.