Space and Physics
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Jupiter has a frankly ridiculous number of moons. So many, in fact, that we haven't even bothered officially naming the last 23. Of the moons, you are probably most familiar with Europa, Io, and Ganymede, but there are 80 moons in total that we know of.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.A new video has put the scale of those moons into perspective, after (of course) comparing them to the size of New York City. The animation by MetaBallStudios takes you from the smallest moons, still big enough to crush much of New York, to Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System, bigger than Mercury.
If you would like to feel even tinier, here is a time-lapse of Jupiter's Galilean moons Europa and Io orbiting the gas giant, showing you just how big Jupiter is because three Earths can fit in the Great Red Spot.
The time-lapse was made by Kevin M.Gill, a NASA-JPL engineer and expert processor of planetary images. He used images taken by the Cassini space probe on a flyby of Jupiter in 2001 (in order to gain a gravitational assist, while also imaging the gas giant and making other observations) before it plunged to its death on Saturn.
