Ganymede tagged posts

Around 4 billion years ago, an asteroid hit the Jupiter moon Ganymede. Now, a Kobe University researcher realized that the Solar System’s biggest moon’s axis has shifted as a result of the impact, which confirmed that the asteroid was around 20 times larger than the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs on Earth, and caused one of the biggest impacts with clear traces in the Solar System.

Ganymede is the la...

For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. This water vapor forms when ice from the moon’s surface sublimates—that is, turns from solid to gas.

Scientists used new and archival datasets from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to make the discovery, published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Previous research has offered circumstantial evidence that Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, contains more water than all of Earth’s oceans. However, temperatures there are so cold that water on the surface is frozen solid...

Researchers from Kobe University and the National Institute of Technology, Oshima College have conducted a detailed reanalysis of image data from Voyager 1, 2 and Galileo spacecraft in order to investigate the orientation and distribution of the ancient tectonic troughs found on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. They discovered that these troughs are concentrically distributed across almost the entire surface of the satellite. This global distribution indicates that these troughs may be actually part of one giant crater covering Ganymede.

Based on the results of a computer simulation conducted using the “PC Cluster” at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), it is speculated that this giant crater could have resulted from the impact o...

The solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede, is captured here alongside the planet Jupiter in a color picture taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 3, 2000.
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

A recently published study led by researchers at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology reveals Ganymede, an icy moon of Jupiter, appears to have undergone complex periods of geologic activity, specifically strike-slip tectonism, as is seen in Earth’s San Andreas fault. This is the first study to exhaustively consider the role of strike-slip tectonism in Ganymede’s geologic history.

Plate tectonics is the process on Earth that has created many familiar large scale features – oceanic and continental crust, mountain ranges, mid-ocean ridges, for example...