Are there moons orbiting venus

The second impact may or may not have created a moon, too. If it did, this moon would have been swept up by the first one on its inward plunge toward doom. Stevenson says that this model can eventually be tested by looking at isotopic signatures in Venusian rocks. For now, its main significance may simply be to restart discussion over Venus's lack of a moon, a conundrum that planetary scientists have barely explored.

Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. One of biggest mysteries in the solar system is why Venus has no moon. Jupiter, for instance, has 79 known moons! The most well-known of Jupiter's moons are Io pronounced eye-oh , Europa, and Callisto. Jupiter also has the biggest moon in our solar system, Ganymede.

These moons are so big you can see them with just a pair of binoculars. Saturn has 53 moons that have been named. Saturn also has 29 moons awaiting confirmation. If all of these moons get confirmed, Saturn will have 82 moons. One of these moons, named Titan, even has its own atmosphere, which is very unusual for a moon. Lastly, Neptune has 14 named moons. By the low mass inner planets anyway. Or is it about the water line in the asteroid belt? Anywhoo, I remember reading an Isaac Asimov essay as a kid that posited that we might be much farther along in science had Venus had a moon that was quite visible from Earth.

We might have left the earth-centric thinking much more quickly. Asimov wrote another, similar, essay speculating what things might be like if the Sun had a smaller binary companion orbiting where Uranus is now. He suggested the star could have an Earth-sized planet of its own which would be visible to the naked eye here. These planets are really close to the Sun. First of all, not THAT close, there are apparently much much closer situation in the galaxy that we have observed.