Xiangliu (moon)
Xiangliu, full designation 225088 Gonggong I Xiangliu, is the only known moon of the scattered-disc likely dwarf planet 225088 Gonggong. It was discovered by a team of astronomers led by Csaba Kiss during an analysis of archival Hubble Space Telescope images of Gonggong. The discovery team had suspected that the slow rotation of Gonggong was caused by tidal forces exerted by an orbiting satellite. Xiangliu was first identified in archival Hubble images taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on 18 September 2010. Its discovery was reported and announced by Gábor Marton, Csaba Kiss, and Thomas Müller at the 48th Meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences on 17 October 2016. The satellite is named after Xiangliu, a nine-headed venomous snake monster in Chinese mythology that attended the water god Gonggong as his chief minister.
Gonggong and its moon Xiangliu, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2010 | |
| Discovery | |
|---|---|
| Discovered by | Gábor Marton Csaba Kiss Thomas Müller |
| Discovery date | 18 September 2010 (first identified) (announced 17 October 2016) |
| Designations | |
| Gonggong I | |
| Pronunciation | /ʃæŋ.ljuː/ SHANG-LEW |
Named after | 相柳 Xiāngliǔ |
| S/2010 (225088) 1 | |
| Orbital characteristics | |
| Epoch 8 December 2014 (JD 2457000.0) | |
| 24021±202 km (prograde), 24274±193 km (retrograde) | |
| Eccentricity | 0.2908±0.007 (prograde), 0.2828±0.0063 (retrograde) |
| 25.22073±0.000357 d (prograde), 25.22385±0.000362 d (retrograde) | |
| Inclination | 83.08°±0.86° (prograde), 119.14°±0.89° (retrograde) |
| 31.99°±1.07° (prograde), 104.09°±0.82° (retrograde) | |
| Satellite of | 225088 Gonggong |
| Physical characteristics | |
Mean diameter | <200 km 40–100 km |
| >0.2 | |
| V–I=1.22±0.17 | |
| 6.93±0.15 | |