Xiangliu (moon)

Common card · No. 382372

Xiangliu (formal designation (225088) Gonggong I) is the only known moon of the trans-Neptunian dwarf planet Gonggong. It was discovered by Gábor Marton, Csaba Kiss, and Thomas Müller in archival Hubble Space Telescope images taken on 18 September 2010. Its discovery was announced at the 48th Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences on 17 October 2016. The moon is named after Xiangliu, the nine-headed venomous snake monster from Chinese mythology who served the water god Gonggong as his chief minister. Xiangliu is estimated to be less than 100 km (60 mi) in diameter and orbits Gonggong every 25.22 days at an average distance of 24,021 km (14,926 mi). It is thought to be tidally locked to Gonggong and may contribute to the maintenance of its highly eccentric orbit through tidal interactions or the Kozai mechanism.

Read on Wikipedia · Image NASA, ESA, C. Kiss (Konkoly Observatory), and J. Stansberry (STScI), Public domain