moon-of-the-day

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The Death of Stars

From the book Knowledge Encyclopedia Science! (DK)

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Moon of the Day

(Picture from NASA.gov)

Hyperion (hai-peir-ee-uhn), a moon of Saturn.

Hyperion was discovered in 1848. Of all of Saturn’s non spherical moons, this one is the largest. It is made of very light materials, probably things like frozen carbon dioxide, which explains why it isn’t spherical, cause it doesn’t have enough mass to do that.

Hyperion is one of Saturn’s farthest out moons, and it rotates chaotically around the planet. The fact that it isn’t tidally locked, which means that one side of the moon would be facing the planet at all times, like our moon, is rare. What scientists think the reason for this is because Hyperion passes close to Saturn’ largest moon, Titan during its orbit. Titan has a lot more mass than Hyperion, and when Hyperion gets close to Titan, it causes a more chaotic rotation and more elongated orbit.

Another feature of Hyperion is its heavily cratered surface. Scientists think this is because the moon is so far away from its planet cause ig very little tidal force. A tidal force is the pull of one object on another object causing changes in the object’s surface. Here’s an image that explains tidal forces.

(Picture from National Geographic)

The lack of tidal forces causes Hyperion to not have enough internal heating to replenish the surface of craters causing the excess craters.

This moon was really interesting to learn about, and I think it helped me understand stuff about just moons as a whole:)

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No moon of the day today because reasons.

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Sometimes I forget that not everyone is as obsessed with astronomy as me and haven’t even heard of things like neutron stars or the Trappist 1 solar system or like, the dragonfly mission. It’s very weird to think about.

Anyway, I was thinking about one of my favorite astronomy facts, and it occurred to me that a lot of the general public have no idea that it exists.

The Pale Blue Dot.

(Picture from NASA.gov)

This is a picture taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on  February 14, 1990. In it, you can see a small dot within the orange-ish stripe. That dot is Earth. This picture was taken 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) away from the sun, and it shows just how small we are.

I genuinely think that this is possibly the most beautiful picture ever taken. I’ve probably cried while looking at it before:/

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Moon of the Day

(Pictures from NASA.gov and Spacepedia.com)

Mimas (mee-muhz), a moon of Saturn.

Mimas was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel. It is the closest to Saturn of the major moons of the planet, and is also the smallest body that we know of to be rounded by its gravity.

The most prominent feature of this moon is the massive crater on its surface. The crater is called Herschel, named after the discoverer of the moon, and is thought to have had such a large impact on this body, that it posed the threat of breaking it in half.

Not only is there this one crater, but there are many visible craters on the surface of the moon. The fact that so many of these craters have been preserved over time lead scientists to believe that the moon is mostly frozen. This was a surprising discovery, and clashed with what we know about another moon of Saturn called Enceladus.

Enceladus is farther away from Saturn than Mimas, and yet it is not a frozen world, and instead has active geysers. This shouldn’t make sense, because according to tidal forces, Mimas should have more internal heating than Enceladus.

A tidal force is the pull of one object on another object causing changes in the object’s surface. Here’s an image that explains tidal forces.

(Picture from National Geographic)

This resulted in what is called the “Mimas test” where any explanation for why Mimas is a frozen world also has to explain why Enceladus has geysers.

This was a really interesting moon to learn about!!! I didn’t think there would be this much information about it, but here we are.

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Moon of the Day

(Picture from NASA.gov)

Umbriel (uhm-bree-el), a moon of Uranus.

Umbriel was discovered in 1851 by William Lassell. It is the darkest moon of Uranus, and only reflects 16 percent of the light that reaches its surface. It was photographed by the Voyager 2 spacecraft when it flew by Uranus, and it showed an uncharacteristically bright area on the moons surface.

There wasn’t too much information about this moon, but I still like it, mostly because the name is pretty, but it’s still a cool moon.

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my favourite thing about our second moon is when it said 'it's moon moon time' and then moon moon-ed all over the place

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Moon of the Day

(Picture from WFAA)

This technically isn’t a moon, but I thought that it would be a good one to make one of these on.

Depicted in the picture above is the orbit of an asteroid called 2024 PT5. On September 29th of this year, it entered our orbit and will stay here until November 25th.

A lot of people are calling this a “temporary moon” of Earth, but really it’s just an asteroid that got launched out of the asteroid belt, and just happened to cross paths with the Earth.

This asteroid has a 36 foot diameter, and is to small to see with the naked eye, so if you want to see it, you’ll have to use a telescope.

I don’t have very much information here, but I need to do other stuff before it hits 12:00, so that’s my excuse. Anyway, since I started this blog, I wanted to make one of these on 2024 PT5 before it left our orbit, so here you go:)

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Moon of the Day

(pictures from Wikipedia and NASA.gov)

Proteus (pro-tee-us), a moon of Neptune.

Proteus was discovered in 1989 by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Despite being the second largest moon of Neptune, it was discovered later than other smaller moons of the planet. This is most likely due to how dark the moon is. It’s one of the darkest things in the solar system, and only reflects six percent of light that hits it

Proteus has a very boxy shape, and if it had a little more mass, it could be a sphere.

I couldn’t find too much about this moon, which doesn’t surprise me since compared to some other moons, it’s kind of boring, but I still with there was more. To fix this problem, I’m going to talk about an assumption I have about the moon. Since it is incredibly dark, I’d imagine that it contains more carbon based materials than anything else, but then again, all of the smaller moons of Neptune are about just as dark as Proteus, so please don’t take this as fact.

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The Pleiades

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Moon of the Day

(pictures from John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and NASA.gov)

Miranda, a moon of Uranus, often compared to Frankenstein‘s monster. I made it Halloween themed, let’s go>:)

Miranda was discovered by Gerard P. Kuiper in 1948. The most prominent aspect of this moon is its deformed appearance. The main theory for why this moon looks the way it does is because of tidal forces from other moons of Uranus.

A tidal force is the pull of one object on another object causing changes in the object’s surface. -I don’t know how to explain it :’(

(Picture from National Geographic)

When scientists were generating what the half of the moon that wasn’t captured in pictures might look like, they had to study all of the ridges of this moon, and what they found was that the surface structures were similar to other moons that have underground oceans. At first the idea that a moon of Uranus could have an underground ocean was crazy, but now, they think that this could be possible because of tidal forces that will heat up the inside of the moon, making it a reasonable temperature for liquid to be sustained. This is all still a theory though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Two days ago, I learned that Miranda could possibly have an underground ocean, so I knew that I wanted to make one of these about it soon. It was pretty cool to learn why it might have the ocean though:)

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If you ever see me rebloging random non astronomy related thing on this account, it was the ghost.

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We learned about asteroids in the last unit of my astronomy class, so I’m just going to drop this key for the three types of asteroids because it’s really funny to me for some reason.

C-type - carbonaceous. Get it? Because C for carbon.

S-type - silicate. Get it? Because S for silicone.

M-type - metal. Get it? Because M for metal.

Each of the elements listed is the main element in each type of asteroid. There can also be asteroids that are a mix of multiple types.

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Moon of the Day

(picture from NASA.gov)

Deimos, a moon of Mars.

Deimos is possibly the smallest moon in our solar system with it’s 9 by 7 by 6.8 miles in size (15 by 12 by 11 kilometers). It was discovered by Asaph Hall and is one of two moons of Mars, both of which are very small.

The origin of this moon is uncertain, but there are multiple theories. The first one you might think of is that Deimos is a captured asteroid since it contains elements of a C-type class (mostly carbon based materials). There are other ones like the potential that this moon and its twin, Phobos, came from Mars in a collision, much like the leading theory for how our own moon was formed. Another theory is that Phobos and Deimos were originally one moon before being split into two. Unfortunately, none of these theories are fully sound and would need more research to determine whether or not any might be true.

I really liked Phobos and Deimos before doing this research since the idea of Mars having moons, especially ones so small is pretty funny to me, I was kind of surprised to learn that there wasn’t a proper theory for how either of them came to be.

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Unfortunately, there will be no moon of the day today:( Personally, I place all of the blame on my English teacher.

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Moon of the Day

(Pictures from NASA.gov and Sci-news)

Amalthea (uh-maal-thee-uh), a moon of Jupiter

Amalthea was discovered on September 9, 1892 by Edward Emerson Barnard.

It is the third closest moon from the planet, and orbits near the larger moon Io. It’s also the reddest object in the whole solar system. A theory for why this is is that it is caused by Jupiter’s strong magnetic field.

(Picture from Sci-news)

Here’s a picture of Amalthea’s shadow on Jupiter.

This was actually a pretty interesting moon to learn about, and I’m glad that I know more about it. Before this, I didn’t even know that it existed.

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Here’s some art I made a few months ago of Pluto (left) and Io (right). Thought I would share it here since this is my astronomy blog.