For centuries, celestial wonders such as Saturn's rings and the Galilean moons of Jupiter delighted those who looked through telescopes. But with the dawn of the space age, robotic explorers traveling through the Solar System have shown us much more than points of light, revealing wondrous, diverse families of worlds orbiting other planets. Among them we will find

• Scores of worlds composed of rock and solid ice, some of which formed with their planets and others of which were captured later.
• Geologically active moons freckled with volcanoes and geysers, and geologically dead moons covered with impact craters.
• Moons that may harbor deep liquid oceans beneath their ice-covered surfaces and may conceivably provide a home for extraterrestrial life.
• Exquisite, delicate structure in ring systems resulting from subtle gravitational interactions among planets, moons, and ring particles.
• The fate of most planetary rings, short-lived compared to the planets they surround.

Organize

• Read Chapter 11 in your textbook or ebook.
• Take the Diagnostic Quiz to assess your understanding of the basic concepts and identify gaps in your understanding of the assigned reading.

Learn

• Use the FlashCards to test your memory for new terms.
• Review the Excursion Box for this chapter:
  • 11.1, The Backlighting Phenomenon
• Work the "Thinking about the Concepts" and "Applying the Concepts" questions in the end of chapter review materials.
• If your instructor has assigned SmartWork online homework, login from the right navigation pane for additional practice and review.

Connect

• Review Connections 11.1, Extreme Environments and an Organic Deep Freeze, and the Seeing the Forest through the Trees section at the chapter's end to draw your attention to recurring themes and help prepare you for concepts explored more fully in subsequent chapters.
• Visit Astronomy in the News for breaking news of new discoveries and the opportunity to apply what you've learned in this chapter to real-world (and real Universe) events.

Links

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About W. W. Norton

W. W. Norton & Company has been independent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Margaret D. Norton first published lectures delivered at the People's Institute, the adult education division of New York City's Cooper Union. The Nortons soon expanded their program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By mid-century, the two major pillars of Norton's publishing program—trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of 400 and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year—W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees.