Given that our solar system has eight planets (or if you’re a Pluto fan, nine) how many moons do you think call our solar system home?
Something like 50 seems reasonable to me; eight planets with an average of six moons apiece, plus one or two others…yeah, let’s go with 50.
Incorrect.
Okay, how about 75?
Not close to correct.
NASA estimates there are nearly 900 – nine hundred! – total moons floating around out there. Saturn alone has 274, and Jupiter another hundred.
The biggest is Jupiter’s Ganymede, which is larger than the planet Mercury. The smallest is Deimos, which orbits Mars and is exactly the same size as Shanghai’s financial district. Our own moon, for reference, has about the same surface area as North and South America combined, which is somehow bigger than I expected.
Granted, not all the solar system’s moons have cool names like some of Jupiter and Saturn’s more well-known celebrity moons (Callisto! Europa! Titan!) and some are just chunks of rock orbiting large asteroids. But still. We are much more a system of moons than a system of planets.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The pairing of a huge booming kick drum and a tiny tapping snare. Like a huge planet orbited by a tiny moon.
2. For the first minute, it sits pretty much on one note, as implied by that booming toned kick drum. But then at 1:19 a four-chord sequence enters that pops the song into three dimensions.
3. Shortly after those chords come in, you can hear faint chatter in the background that sounds like audio from space missions, similar to the songs we listened to in week 359 and week 694.
Recommended listening activity:
Watching a moonrise.