Ganymede is a natural satellite of Jupiter and is the largest and most massive moon in the Solar System. Like Saturn's largest moon, Titan, it is larger than the planet Mercury, but has somewhat less surface gravity than Mercury, Io, or Earth's Moon due to its lower density compared to the three. Ganymede orbits Jupiter in roughly seven days and is in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively.
Ganymede is composed of silicate rock and water in approximately equal proportions. It is a fully differentiated body with an iron-rich, liquid metallic core, giving it the lowest moment of inertia factor of any solid body in the Solar System. Its internal ocean potentially contains more water than all of Earth's oceans combined.
Ganymede is the only natural satellite in the solar system to possess an internally generated magnetic field. It is probably created by convection within its core, and influenced by tidal forces from Jupiter's far greater magnetic field. Ganymede has a thin oxygen atmosphere that includes , , and possibly . Atomic hydrogen is a minor atmospheric constituent. Whether Ganymede has an ionosphere associated with its atmosphere is unresolved.
Ganymede's surface is composed of two main types of terrain, the first of which are lighter regions, generally crosscut by extensive grooves and ridges, dating from slightly less than 4 billion years ago, covering two-thirds of Ganymede. The cause of the light terrain's disrupted geology is not fully known, but may be the result of tectonic activity due to tidal heating. The second terrain type are darker regions saturated with impact craters, which are dated to four billion years ago.
Ganymede's discovery is credited to Simon Marius and Galileo Galilei, who both observed it in 1610, as the third of the Galilean moons, the first group of objects discovered orbiting another planet. Marius soon named it after Ganymede, a Trojan prince desired by Zeus, who carried him off to serve as cupbearer to the gods.
Beginning with Pioneer 10, several spacecraft have explored Ganymede. The Voyager probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, refined measurements of its size, while Galileo discovered its underground ocean and magnetic field. The next planned mission to the Jovian system is the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice), which was launched in 2023. After flybys of all three icy Galilean moons, it is planned to enter orbit around Ganymede.
History Chinese astronomical records report that in 365 BC, Gan De observed a small reddish star beside Jupiter, which might have been a moon of Jupiter, possibly Ganymede, with the naked eye. However, Gan De reported the color of the companion as reddish, which is puzzling since Ganymede is too faint for its color to be perceived with the naked eye. Shi Shen and Gan De together made fairly accurate observations of the five major planets.
On January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to observe what he thought were three stars near Jupiter, including what turned out to be Ganymede, Callisto, and one body that turned out to be the combined light from Io and Europa; the next night he noticed that they had moved. On January 13, he saw all four at once for the first time, but had seen each of the moons before this date at least once. By January 15, Galileo concluded that the stars were actually bodies orbiting Jupiter.
Name Galileo claimed the right to name the moons he had discovered. He considered "Cosmian Stars" and settled on "Medicean Stars", in honor of Cosimo II de' Medici.
The French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc suggested individual names from the Medici family for the moons, but his proposal was not taken up. Simon Marius, who had originally claimed to have found the Galilean satellites, tried to name the moons the "Saturn of Jupiter", the "Jupiter of Jupiter" (this was Ganymede), the "Venus of Jupiter", and the "Mercury of Jupiter", another nomenclature that never caught on. Later on, after finding out about a suggestion from Johannes Kepler, Marius agreed with Kepler's proposal and so he then proposed a naming system based on Greek mythology instead. This final Kepler/Marius proposal was ultimately successful.
This name and those of the other Galilean satellites fell into disfavor for a considerable time, and were not in common use until the mid-20th century. In much of the earlier astronomical literature, Ganymede is referred to instead by its Roman numeral designation, (a system introduced by Galileo), in other words "the third satellite of Jupiter". Following the discovery of moons of Saturn, a naming system based on that of Kepler and Marius was used for Jupiter's moons. Ganymede is the only Galilean moon of Jupiter named after a male figure—like Io, Europa, and Callisto, he was a lover of Zeus.
In English, the Galilean satellites Io, Europa and Callisto have the Latin spellings of their names, but the Latin form of Ganymede is Ganymēdēs, which would be pronounced .Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, 1995. However, the final syllable is dropped in English, perhaps under the influence of French Ganymède ().
Planetary moons other than Earth's were never given symbols in the astronomical literature. Denis Moskowitz, a software engineer who designed most of the dwarf planet symbols, proposed a Greek gamma (the initial of Ganymede) combined with the cross-bar of the Jupiter symbol as the symbol of Ganymede (). This symbol is not widely used.
Orbit and rotation
Ganymede orbits Jupiter at a distance of , third among the Galilean satellites, and completes a revolution every seven days and three hours (7.155 days). Like most known moons, Ganymede is tidally locked, with one side always facing toward the planet, hence its day is also seven days and three hours. Its orbit is very slightly eccentric and inclined to the Jovian equator, with the eccentricity and inclination changing quasi-periodically due to solar and planetary gravitational perturbations on a timescale of centuries. The ranges of change are 0.0009–0.0022 and 0.05–0.32°, respectively. These orbital variations cause the axial tilt (the angle between the rotational and orbital axes) to vary between 0 and 0.33°.
Ganymede participates in orbital resonances with Europa and Io: for every orbit of Ganymede, Europa orbits twice and Io orbits four times. Conjunctions (alignment on the same side of Jupiter) between Io and Europa occur when Io is at periapsis and Europa at apoapsis. Conjunctions between Europa and Ganymede occur when Europa is at periapsis. The longitudes of the Io–Europa and Europa–Ganymede conjunctions change at the same rate, making triple conjunctions impossible. Such a complicated resonance is called the Laplace resonance. The current Laplace resonance is unable to pump the orbital eccentricity of Ganymede to a higher value. The value of about 0.0013 is probably a remnant from a previous epoch, when such pumping was possible. The Ganymedian orbital eccentricity is somewhat puzzling; if it is not pumped now it should have decayed long ago due to the tidal dissipation in the interior of Ganymede. This means that the last episode of the eccentricity excitation happened only several hundred million years ago. Because Ganymede's orbital eccentricity is relatively low—on average 0.0015—tidal heating is negligible now. However, in the past Ganymede may have passed through one or more Laplace-like resonances that were able to pump the orbital eccentricity to a value as high as 0.01–0.02. This probably caused a significant tidal heating of the interior of Ganymede; the formation of the grooved terrain may be a result of one or more heating episodes.
There are two hypotheses for the origin of the Laplace resonance among Io, Europa, and Ganymede: that it is primordial and has existed from the beginning of the Solar System; or that it developed after the formation of the Solar System. A possible sequence of events for the latter scenario is as follows: Io raised tides on Jupiter, causing Io's orbit to expand (due to conservation of momentum) until it encountered the 2:1 resonance with Europa; after that, the expansion continued, but some of the angular moment was transferred to Europa as the resonance caused its orbit to expand as well; the process continued until Europa encountered the 2:1 resonance with Ganymede. Eventually the drift rates of conjunctions between all three moons were synchronized and locked in the Laplace resonance.
Bulk properties Size
With a diameter of about and a mass of , Ganymede is the largest and most massive moon in the Solar System. It is slightly more massive than the second most massive moon, Saturn's satellite Titan, and is more than twice as massive as the Earth's Moon. It is larger than the planet Mercury, which has a diameter of but is only 45 percent of Mercury's mass. Ganymede is the ninth-largest object in the solar system, but the tenth-most massive.
Composition The average density of Ganymede, 1.936 g/cm3 (a bit greater than Callisto's), suggests a composition of about equal parts rocky material and mostly water ices. Some of the water is liquid, forming an underground ocean. The mass fraction of ices is between 46 and 50 percent, which is slightly lower than that in Callisto. Some additional volatile ices such as ammonia may also be present. The exact composition of Ganymede's rock is not known, but is probably close to the composition of L/LL type ordinary chondrites, which are characterized by less total iron, less metallic iron and more iron oxide than H chondrites. The weight ratio of iron to silicon ranges between 1.05 and 1.27 in Ganymede, whereas the solar ratio is around 1.8.
Internal structure Ganymede appears to be fully differentiated, with an internal structure consisting of an iron-sulfide–iron core, a silicate mantle, and outer layers of water ice and liquid water. The precise thicknesses of the different layers in the interior of Ganymede depend on the assumed composition of silicates (fraction of olivine and pyroxene) and amount of sulfur in the core. Ganymede has the lowest moment of inertia factor, 0.31, among the solid Solar System bodies. This is a consequence of its substantial water content and fully differentiated interior.
Subsurface oceans
In the 1970s, NASA scientists first suspected that Ganymede had a thick ocean between two layers of ice, one on the surface and one beneath a liquid ocean and atop the rocky mantle. In the 1990s, NASA's Galileo mission flew by Ganymede, and found indications of such a subsurface ocean. An analysis published in 2014, taking into account the realistic thermodynamics for water and effects of salt, suggests that Ganymede might have a stack of several ocean layers separated by different phases of ice, with the lowest liquid layer adjacent to the rocky mantle. Water–rock contact may be an important factor in the origin of life. The analysis also notes that the extreme depths involved (~800 km to the rocky "seafloor") mean that temperatures at the bottom of a convective (adiabatic) ocean can be up to 40 K higher than those at the ice–water interface.