who discovered the four largest moons of jupiter
Galileo Galilei
title: Moons of Jupiter text: Moons of Jupiter There are 79 known moons of Jupiter. This gives Jupiter the largest number of moons with reasonably stable orbits of any planet in the Solar System. The most massive of the moons are the four Galilean moons, which were independently discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei and Simon Marius and were the first objects found to orbit a body that was neither Earth nor the Sun. From the end of the 19th century, dozens of much smaller Jovian moons have been discovered and have received the names of lovers or daughters of the Roman god Jupiter or title: Moons of Jupiter text: that the Voyager space probes reached Jupiter, around 1979, 13 moons had been discovered, not including Themisto, which had been observed in 1975, but was lost until 2000 due to insufficient initial observation data. The Voyager spacecraft discovered an additional three inner moons in 1979: Metis; Adrastea; and Thebe. No additional moons were discovered for two decades, generally during the 1980s and 1990s, but between October 1999 and February 2003, researchers found another 34 moons using sensitive ground-based detectors. These are tiny moons, in long, eccentric, generally retrograde orbits, and averaging in diameter, with the largest being just across. All title: Moons of Jupiter text: his results in March 1610. Simon Marius had independently discovered the moons one day after Galileo, although he did not publish his book on the subject until 1614. Even so, the names Marius assigned are used today: Ganymede; Callisto; Io; and Europa. No additional satellites were discovered until E. E. Barnard observed Amalthea in 1892. With the aid of telescopic photography, further discoveries followed quickly over the course of the 20th century. Himalia was discovered in 1904, Elara in 1905, Pasiphae in 1908, Sinope in 1914, Lysithea and Carme in 1938, Ananke in 1951, and Leda in 1974.By the time title: Moons of Jupiter text: of these moons are thought to have been captured asteroidal or perhaps comet bodies, possibly fragmented into several pieces. By 2015, a total of 15 additional moons were discovered. Two more were discovered in 2016 by the team led by Scott S. Sheppard at the Carnegie Institution for Science, bringing the total to 69. On 17 July 2018, the International Astronomical Union confirmed that Sheppard's team discovered ten more moons around Jupiter, bringing the total number to 79. Among these is Valetudo, which has a prograde orbit, but crosses paths with several moons that have retrograde orbits, making an eventual title: Moons of Jupiter text: to absorb much of their momentum and thus capture them into orbit. Many are believed to have broken up by mechanical stresses during capture, or afterward by collisions with other small bodies, producing the moons we see today. Some scholars propose that the earliest record of a Jovian moon (Ganymede or Callisto) is a note by Chinese astronomer Gan De of an observation around 364 BC. However, the first certain observations of Jupiter's satellites were those of Galileo Galilei in 1609. By January 1610, he had sighted the four massive Galilean moons with his 30× magnification telescope, and he published