Xiangliu

Gonggong and its moon Xangliu (arrow)

Xiangliu is the only moon of the 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 thought that the slow rotation of Gonggong was caused by tidal forces exerted by a moon. 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 poisonous snake monster in Chinese mythology that attended the water god Gonggong as his chief minister.

Xiangliu Media

An image of Xiangliu from the Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China.

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