Moons of our Solar System: Jupiter´s moons, Prologue

Hi,
today I will continue to write about moons. Now I will be stucked on the moons of Jupiter for while since it seems that there are about 8 worth a separate posts so this will take some time and today I will try to introduce them.

So for now there are 67 confirmed moons of Jupiter which is most in the whole Solar System. They are named after Jupiter/Zeus´s lovers daughters etc.
After while we run out of those names so we started to repeat them with little changes like: Ganymede>>Ganymed
Callisto>>Kallisto and so on. All moons of Jupiter are tidaly locked.
Those moons are in different groups and the most important are Galilean moons.

Galilean moons are four moons discovered by Galileo Galilei. He discovered them in the year of 1610 even that there are some informations saying that before him chinese astronomer found them. What is sure is that independently day after Galileo, Simon Marius found them too and he was the one who gave them the names we use now (before we called them Jupiter I, Jupiter II…).
From left to right you can see on the picture: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. All of them except Callisto interact through gravitation, they heat each other´s interior through friction.

On the right you can see Galilean moons from Celestia with their orbits. The pie graph shows mass of moons.
Second group really worth mentioning is Amalthea group (beatiful name). Those are inner satellites which orbit really closely to Jupiter.
Members of this group are: Amalthea, Thebe, Adrasthea, Metis.

Below you can see picture of Amalthea.

On last picture are the other moons with their irregullar orbits, there arises a question how much should they be considered moons when they are so small.

Dragallur

Pictures taken from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Jupiter —> here you can find table of all Jupiter´s moons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalthea_%28moon%29

Info:
Crash Course video Jupiter´s moons

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