What is the Largest Moon in Solar System, Biggest Moon in Solar System

Biggest Moon in the Solar System

Summary – What is the largest moon in our solar system? Take a look at Ganymede, Jupiter's large moon that beats Mercury in size and has serves ice on the poles. Read on:

Within the solar system, we've counted more than 100 moons and we're still counting. To Earth's credit, there's only one moon. Jupiter has something like 66 moons (we're still counting) and incidentally, when you talk of the largest moon, you've got to think of Jupiter.

The biggest moon in the Solar System is Ganymede, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter.

Ganymede was first seen and identified by Galileo along with three other moons on Jupiter. Although we now know that Jupiter has over 65 moons, the four were the largest and so identified with the telescopes that Galileo had.

Ganymede is larger than Mercury. If you placed Ganymede alongside Titan, the second largest moon in our solar system, you'd probably find it to be of equal size because it's fractionally larger than Titan. But imagine a moon is larger than a planet!

Ganymede quite naturally is much larger than Moon too.

How large is Ganymede?

Radius: 2634 km. (in comparison, Moon is 1737 km in radius).

Mass: 1.48 x 10²³ kg. (that's about 2.5% of Earth's mass)

So what exactly is interesting about the largest moon in the Solar System?

Since the 1960s, several flybys have been made to this moon. Voyager, Pioneer, Galileo and many other spacecrafts have taken pictures and sent them back to Earth. (it takes over 35 minutes for communication to reach us from Ganymede).

Early grainy photographs like this one have been replaced by new ones taken by Galileo and show quite a lot of detail about the moon's surface.

Scientists have speculated and later – through spectrography – decided that Ganymede has quite a lot of ice / water on the surface near the poles. Ganymede is also known to have a strong magnetosphere being close to Jupiter. Nevertheless, even though it's a place to look for possible signs of life in the extremely cold temperature zones, research in this regard hasn't yet begun.

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