The Carme group: Jupiter’s tightest moon family

Why Taygete and its siblings are thought to be pieces of one body.

Published 2026-10-23

Jupiter’s retrograde moons fall into families. The Carme group is the most tightly clustered.^[4]

Very similar orbits

Core members are separated by less than 900,000 km in average distance and only 0.6° in inclination.^[4] That tiny spread can be explained by a gentle velocity kick of 5–50 m/s — what you would expect from fragments of one body.^[4]

Very similar colours

The members appear light red, with infrared spectra like D-type asteroids, consistent with a parent from the Hilda family or the Jupiter trojans.^[4] Taygete fits, at B−V 0.56 and V−R 0.52.^[1]

One big survivor

The parent was probably about 46 km across, the size of Carme itself, and Carme still holds 99% of the group’s mass.^[4] The rest — including Taygete — are small chips.

An impact, not a moon-on-moon crash

Collisions between retrograde moons are rare: simulations suggest only about one in 4.5 billion years. A collision with a passing planetesimal is the more likely trigger.^[4]

Numbered citations link to the sources list on the Taygete overview page.