How many known moons are in the solar system?

Answer 1

Yes, though from Earth they appear to be about the same size. The sun and moon appear to be the same size but in actuality the sun is quite a bit larger. The diameter of the sun is about 864,900 miles and the moon is only 2,160 miles. The reason for the apparent size equality is due to the distance of each from the earth. The moon is much closer at 238,857 miles, while the sun is 93,000,000 miles away.

Answer 2

There are 214 known moons in our solar system, orbiting the various planets and dwarf planets. The largest number of moons are around gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, with dozens of satellites each. Mercury and Venus are the only planets in our solar system that do not have any moons.

Answer 3

It depends which moon and which sun you are talking about. if you are talking about earth's moon and the solar systems sun, NO! the sun is many times bigger than the moon. All stars are actually suns, and most planets have many moons. It really depends which ones you are talking about.

It also depends on what you mean by "big". Physically larger or more massive ****************** The sun is actually 400 times larger than the moon, with a diameter of 865,000 miles as compared to the moon's 2,160 miles.

Answer 4

The earth's diameter is 3.7 times the diameter of the moon.

The earth's surface area is 13.4 times the surface area of the moon.

The earth's volume is 48.9 times the volume of the moon.

The earth's mass is 81 times the mass of the moon.

Looks like the answer is 'no'.

Answer 5

166 moons of planets:

Earth - 1

Mars - 2

Jupiter - 63

Saturn - 60

Uranus - 27

Neptune - 13

6 moons of dwarf planets dwarf planets: Pluto - 3 Haumea - 2 Eris - 1

Also, there are 104 asteroid moons and 58 satellites of Trans-Neptunian objects

Answer 6

The moon rotates on its axis with a period of 27.32 earth days.

So, nominally, each Earth Day is 1/27.32 = 0.0366 of a moon rotation. (rounded)

This number is going to be wrong by roughly 1/4 %, because the the question

asks for it in terms of "earth rotations", and one of those is actually 236 seconds

shorter than a day. But the number derived above is close enough to convey

the order of magnitude, and we strongly doubt that the residual inaccuracy

is going to be a serious concern to the person who posted the question.

Answer 7

Yes. 10,000 Earths could fit inside the Sun and the moon is smaller than Earth. If the moon was bigger we wouldn't have daylight. The moon would cover the sun.

Yes, its true that sun is much larger than moon. If the size is concerned, then it can be said that since 13 lakhs earth is equivalent to one sun and moon is a satellite of earth, so definitely sun will be greater than moon......

Answer 8

Nobody knows, or will know. There are about 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

If we assume (incorrectly) that each star has the same amount as moons as our Sun, then the total will be around 37,600,000,000,000 moons

Answer 9

Define "moon". There are sixty-some bodies orbiting Saturn that we know about large enough to not be "just another ring fragment", but there are almost certainly more that we don't know about yet.

Setting the arbitrary lower mass limit at ten million gigatonnes (which sounds like a lot, but for comparison purposes the Earth's Moon has a mass nearly 8,000 times larger), then there are six. The probability there could be an undiscovered moon of Saturn that size is essentially zero.

Answer 10

The answer is unknown. In our solar system, Mercury and Venus have no moons. Earth has one natural satellite. Mars has two moons. Jupiter is known to have 64, and Saturn at least 60. Uranus has 27 and Neptune 13. The total number of moons in our solar system is therefore at least 167. The dwarf planet Pluto is accompanied by Charon, which is more of a coplanet than a moon, due to its relative size.

We have found over 100 solar systems beyond ours--stars with planets. We cannot yet detect moons about those planets. It is quite an achievement simply to confirm the existence of exoplanets (planets orbiting other suns).

Planets may be more common in spiral galaxies than in globular galaxies, which would reduce the number of moons. Still, to arrive at a "conservative" average, let's assume each star has planets with a total of 10 moons. Many may have no planets at all, but some (like ours) will have far more than that. Since there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, that would suggest perhaps a trillion moons. As there are a hundred billion galaxies in the universe, the product would be a hundred billion trillion moons.

100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is one hundred octillion.