Moons of the solar system

The giant planets each carry a system of their own. These moons orbit at their real periods and real distances, so you can watch Io race around Jupiter in under two days while Callisto takes more than a fortnight.

Several are among the most interesting places in the solar system: buried oceans on Europa and Enceladus, methane rivers on Titan, active volcanoes on Io.

Moons of the solar system — all 58 objects

• Adrastea — A tiny moon riding at the outer edge of Jupiter’s main ring. Like its neighbour Metis, it circles Jupiter…
• Amalthea — A deep-red lump skimming just above Jupiter’s cloud tops, dyed by sulfur blasted off Io and stretched by…
• Ariel — Valleys and faults crisscross its young, bright face.
• Atlas — A flying saucer in orbit: ring dust settling onto Atlas’s equator built the smooth disc that makes it one of…
• Callisto — An ancient face unchanged for four billion years — every scar of the early solar system still on display.
• Calypso — Tethys’s trailing companion, holding station forever 60 degrees behind in the same orbit.
• Charon — So large relative to Pluto that the pair waltz around a point between them — the solar system’s great double…
• Daphnis — A five-mile moonlet that carves the Keeler Gap, raising kilometre-high waves in the ring edges that cast…
• Deimos — Mars’s tiny outer moon — from the surface it would look like a bright, slow star.
• Despina — A dark, irregular moon about 150 km across, found in Voyager 2 images weeks before the 1989 flyby.
• Dione — Bright ice cliffs streak its face where the crust fractured long ago.
• Enceladus — The brightest world in the solar system, venting its buried ocean into space — Cassini flew through the…
• Epimetheus — Half of the solar system’s only co-orbital pair: every four years Epimetheus and Janus close in on each…
• Europa — Beneath a cracked shell of ice lies twice as much liquid water as all Earth’s oceans — one of the most…
• Galatea — Galatea orbits about 1,000 km inside the Adams ring. That ring holds bright clumps of material called arcs…
• Ganymede — A planet in all but name: bigger than Mercury, with its own magnetic field and a buried ocean of its own.
• Halimede — A small grey moon looping backwards around Neptune every 5.1 years, about 17 million km out on average.
• Helene — Dione’s leading trojan, its surface streaked by flows of ultra-fine dust that behave almost like a liquid in…
• Himalia — The largest of Jupiter’s far-flung irregular moons, probably a captured asteroid. It loops around Jupiter…
• Hippocamp — Too faint for Voyager 2 to spot, Hippocamp turned up in 2013 in Hubble images taken years earlier.
• Hydra — Pluto’s outermost known moon is a bright, irregular chunk of nearly pure water ice about 50 km long.
• Hyperion — The sponge moon: so porous that impacts punch in rather than splash out, and tumbling so chaotically that no…
• Iapetus — The yin-yang moon: one side black as soot, the other white as snow, with a mountain ridge circling its…
• Io — A world being kneaded alive: Jupiter’s gravity pumps so much heat into Io that it constantly turns itself…
• Janus — The larger of the co-orbital twins, waltzing with Epimetheus in a gravitational do-si-do that has repeated…
• Kerberos — A tiny double-lobed moon, probably two pieces stuck together. It was expected to be dark, but the 2015 New…
• Laomedeia — A faint moon about 23 million km from Neptune, taking almost 9 years per lap on a tilted, stretched orbit.
• Larissa — A dark, cratered relic of Neptune’s original moons, shattered and reassembled after Triton’s violent arrival.
• Metis — Jupiter’s innermost moon whips around in about seven hours — faster than Jupiter itself spins — skimming the…
• Mimas — The Death Star moon — the impact that dug Herschel crater nearly shattered it.
• Miranda — A patchwork world that looks shattered and reassembled, home to the tallest cliff in the solar system.
• Moon — Born from a planet-sized impact 4.5 billion years ago, the Moon stabilizes Earth’s tilt and raises its tides.
• Naiad — Neptune’s innermost moon laps the planet in about seven hours, faster than Neptune spins, so tides are…
• Nereid — Neptune’s outlier swings from 1.4 to 9.6 million km out on one of the most eccentric orbits of any known…
• Neso — Neso wanders farther from its planet than almost any other known moon: so far that one backwards lap takes…
• Nix — A small, bright, elongated moon that circles Pluto and Charon together rather than Pluto alone.
• Oberon — The outermost of the classical Uranian moons, scarred and still.
• Pan — The innermost shepherd moon, sweeping the Encke Gap clear as it goes. Ring dust piled onto its equator gives…
• Pandora — The F ring’s outer guardian, herding the narrow ring from outside while Prometheus works the inner edge.
• Phobos — A captured lump of rubble racing around Mars three times a day, so low that Mars’s tides are slowly reeling…
• Phoebe — Saturn’s outcast: a captured Kuiper Belt body circling backwards far beyond the regular moons, shedding the…
• Prometheus — The F ring’s inner shepherd — a potato-shaped moon that dips into the ring each orbit, dragging out dark…
• Proteus — Bigger than Mimas yet still a lump: Proteus sits right at the size where gravity almost — but not quite…
• Psamathe — One of the most distant moons of any planet, Psamathe takes about 25 years to circle Neptune — backwards…
• Puck — Voyager 2 found Puck weeks before its 1986 flyby and took the only close-up: a dark, roughly round, cratered…
• Rhea — A quiet, heavily cratered ice world — possibly with the only ring system ever suspected around a moon.
• S/2002 N5 — First glimpsed in 2002 but lost before its orbit could be pinned down, this moon was found again in 2021 and…
• S/2021 N1 — One of the faintest moons ever found from the ground: confirming it took long, stacked exposures on three of…
• Sao — Sao takes about 8 years to circle Neptune, some 22 million km out, on an orbit tilted about 50 degrees.
• Styx — The smallest known moon of Pluto, a sliver of ice about 16 km long found by Hubble while scouting for…
• Telesto — A smooth, dust-mantled moonlet camped in the Lagrange point ahead of Tethys — one of only four trojan moons…
• Tethys — An icy ball split nearly pole-to-pole by a vast canyon.
• Thalassa — A small, oddly flat moon circling between two of Neptune’s faint rings. Naiad shares its neighbourhood, but…
• Thebe — A battered inner moon whose knocked-off dust forms one of Jupiter’s faint gossamer rings.
• Titan — The only moon with a thick atmosphere and the only world beyond Earth with liquid on its surface — rivers…
• Titania — Largest of the five — canyons longer than the Grand Canyon cut its icy shell.
• Triton — Neptune’s stolen moon: a captured Kuiper Belt object orbiting backwards, with nitrogen geysers erupting…
• Umbriel — A dark, ancient ball with one mysterious bright ring — the “fluorescent cheerio” of Wunda crater.

Back to the interactive 3D map of the universe · See the scale of the universe