15 Facts About Skathi (moon)

Skathi is one of Saturn's irregular moons, in its Norse group of satellites.

Skathi takes just over 725 days to complete an orbit of Saturn and it is estimated to take 11.

Not much is known about Skathi, because it is a dim object.

Skathi was discovered on September 23, 2000, by Brett J Gladman, John J Kavelaars, Jean-Marc Petit, Hans Scholl, Matthew J Holman, Brian G Marsden, Phil Nicholson, and Joseph A Burns.

Skathi's name was specifically chosen to diversify the origins of names given to astronomical objects.

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For Skathi he selected a name from Norse mythology, in which Skaði is a giantess who traveled to Asgard to avenge the death of her father.

When Skathi was given its permanent name, it was assigned the Roman numeral designation Saturn XXVII.

Skathi has a retrograde orbit, meaning that it orbits in the opposite direction as Saturn's orbit.

An orbital period of just over two years is fast for an irregular satellite of Saturn, and Skathi completes an orbit faster than any other known retrograde moon of Saturn except Phoebe.

In some ways Skathi's orbit is typical of Saturn's irregular moons, but its orbit differs in some important ways from all of the other objects in this group: for instance, its orbit is unusually fast for an irregular satellite of Saturn, and has a smaller semi-major axis than all of Saturn's other retrograde moons except Phoebe.

Skathi was first identified by Earth-based observations, and much of the information about Skathi's features and composition comes from observations taken from the Earth.

The amount of light that Skathi reflects varies substantially as it rotates, which implies that it is an irregularly shaped object.

The density of Skathi is not known, but Saturnian irregular satellites are typically not dense, below 1 gram per cubic centimetre, and low densities are thought to characterize most of these objects.

One possibility is that Skathi originally formed somewhere other than in the vicinity of Saturn, and then began to travel through space before being captured by the planet.

However, it is possible that Skathi is a piece of debris that was knocked off of one of Saturn's other moons, during a collision with another object.