May 8, 2000
Somewhere in the sky tonight, a star is being born in a cloud of gas and dust, beginning a journey that will last billions of years.
Jupiter's Moons Thebe, Amalthea, and Metis
Birthday · May 8, 2000
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APOD published May 8, 2000. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
The robot spacecraft Galileo in orbit around Jupiter has recently photographed the inner moons of Jupiter in greater detail than ever before. These pictures of Thebe, Amalthea, and Metis are shown to scale, and reveal details as small as three kilometers across. Amalthea, by contrast, has a total length of about 200 kilometers. The moons are composed mostly of ice, are much smaller than Jupiter's more famous Galilean satellites (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto), and orbit between Io and Jupiter's rings. Thebe appears dominated by a huge impact crater 40 kilometers across. Astronomers are uncertain of the origin of the unusual white gash at the bottom of Amalthea.