7.2 Satellites of jupiter

Jupiter has a large number of satellites. Of these, four are comparable to the Earth's Moon in size; the rest are orders of magnitude smaller. When Jupiter is at opposition and closest to the Earth, the stellar magnitude of its four large moons is between 5 and 6.

But first Galileo had to make adjustments to the instruments. When viewing bodies that are very bright and very small, the optical defects of the telescope can be crippling. By trial and error Galileo learned to stop down the aperture of his instrument until he could begin to make useful observations. At the end of 1609, as he was finishing his series of observations of the Moon , Jupiter was at opposition and the brightest object in the evening sky (not counting the Moon). When he had made the new adjustment to his instrument, he turned his attention to Jupiter. On 7 January 1610 he observed the planet and saw what he thought were three fixed stars near it, strung out on a line through the planet. This formation caught his attention, and he returned to it the following evening.

Galileo's expectation was that Jupiter, which was then in its retrograde loop,

The moons of Jupiter had a major impact on cosmology. In 1610 the traditional Aristotelian cosmology had come under attacks from Copernican astronomers. Aristotelians had a number of arguments against the Copernican System , one of which was now made obsolete. In traditional cosmology, there was only one center of motion, the center of the universe which was the place of the Earth. The motions of all heavenly bodies centered on the Earth. But according to the Copernican theory, the Earth went around the Sun while the Moon went around the Earth. There were thus two centers of motion, which seemed an absurdity. Moreover, if the Earth was a planet, like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, why was it the only planet to have a Moon? Galileo's discovery answered this question. The Earth was, in fact, not the only planet to have a moon, Jupiter had four. And no matter what cosmological system one believed in, there were now at least two centers of motion in the universe, the Earth or Sun and Jupiter. Thus, although the satellites (the term was first used by Johannes Kepler ) of Jupiter were by no means proof of the truth of the Copernican system, they certainly added ammunition on that side of the argument.