The Moons of Saturn Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Saturn has the largest known number of natural satellites of any of the eight planets in the solar system. By 1847, just seven of these were known and each was unnamed and referred to only by a number. This number was meant to refer to its position relative to its distance from the planet but as these numbers had been given when only five moons were known, the naming of the sixth and seventh rendered these numbers meaningless.

So in 1847, John Herschel, the son of William who had discovered moons six and seven, suggested that they should be named after the brothers and sisters of Cronus, the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Saturn. The seven were;

Titan, the largest of the Saturnian moons, and the second largest moon in the solar system, was named after the Titans, the descendants of the primordial gods Uranus and Gaia, the god of the sky and mother Earth. It was the first non-Earth object in the solar system on which evidence of a stable body liquid has been found on its surface.

Iapetus, the third largest of the moons, is named after a brother of Cronus. The mythical Titan was locked up in Tartarus, the deep abyss, along with Cronus. It is believed that this name was chosen for the moon because of its remoteness and obscurity from view.

Rhea is the second largest moon, named for the wife of Cronus. Discovered by Giovanni Cassini in 1672, it is notable for being mainly made up of ice and for rotating synchronously. That means that it rotates at the same speed that it revolves, meaning that the same hemisphere of the moon faces the planet continuously.

Dione was also discovered by Cassini in 1684 and is named for a consort of Zeus and the mother of Aphrodite. Despite being only the 15th largest moon in the solar system, the mass of Dione is greater than the combined mass of all the smaller moons in the solar system.

Tethys is the least dense of all the known moons in the solar system because it is mostly made up of frozen water. The last of the four moons discovered by Cassini, it is named for the wife of Oceanus and the mother of the river gods and the Oceanid nymphs.

Eight years on from the discovery of the planet Uranus that made him famous, William Herschel discovered the Saturnian moon Enceladus in 1789. A smallish ball of ice and rock, Enceladus is a highly active moon with cryovolcanos that shoot ice, salt and hydrogen into space at a rate of about a tonne every five seconds. It is posited that there is hydrothermal activity on the moon that could support life. Given its seismic activity the moon is appropriately named after the Giant Enceladus who is said to be buried under Mount Etna in Sicily.

Mimas is the last of the seven moons in our quiz to be named by John Herschel and another discovered by his father. Named for a Giant who was killed by Hephaestus in the war between the Olympians and the Giants, Mimas is a rocky moon whose most prominent feature is a giant crater, named after its discoverer, that is nearly one-third of the diameter of the whole moon and is ten kilometres deep in places.

After the naming of the first seven moons, new moons that were discovered continued with the same naming convention until the discoveries got so numerous that it was no longer fit for purpose.

Hyperion was discovered just one year after the previously known seven moons were named. Named after the elder brother of Cronus, it is one of the largest non-spherical moons in the solar system. Like Mimas it is dominated by a giant crater and shares with Earth's moon the characteristic of having an electrically charged surface.

Phoebe was discovered in 1899 by William Henry Pickering. It was the first moon in the solar system to be discovered by photograph. Named after a goddess who was a sister of Cronus and the grandmother of Artemis and Apollo, it is suspected that the moon is an object that escaped the Kuiper belt between Jupiter and Neptune and was captured by Saturn.

Epimetheus was discovered in 1966 and named after the twin brother of Prometheus and the son of Iapetus. Astronomers were at first unaware that it was a distinct object from Janus, another satellite discovered the same year, as the two moons share the same orbit.

Of the wrong answers, Callisto is a moon of Jupiter, Oberon is a moon of Uranus, Phobos is the larger of the two moons of Mars,Triton is Neptune's largest moon and Charon is a moon of the dwarf planet Pluto.