(ORDO NEWS) — The origin of the name of the moon is a very interesting story. People have known about this big white ball in the sky since they first roamed the Earth.
The appearance of the moon changes over the months. It moves through the phases from the full moon to the new moon and back.
Where did the word moon come from?
Earth has only one moon. People in ancient times used the moon to measure the passage of months. The word moon can be traced back to mōna, an Old English word from medieval times. Mōna shares its origins with the Latin words metri meaning measurement and mensis meaning month.
So we see that the moon is called the moon because it is used to measure the months.
Galileo’s discovery
So why do the moons around other planets have names, but we just have the moon?
When the moon was named, people only knew about our moon. Everything changed in 1610, when the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons.
Other astronomers across Europe discovered five moons around Saturn during the 1600s. These objects became known as moons because they were close to their planets, just as our own moon is close to Earth.
It’s fair to say that other moons are named after our own moon.
Each newly discovered moon has been given beautiful names to identify it among the growing number of planets and moons that astronomers have found in the solar system.
Many of these names originated from Greek myths. The four large moons discovered by Galileo around Jupiter were named Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Astronomers continue to find new moons orbiting planets in our solar system. In October 2019, astronomers announced that they had recently discovered 20 more moons around Saturn.
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