Two-tone moon
Saturn boasts 53 named moons, plus another 29 that are still waiting to be confirmed as actual moons before being officially named. Take that, Earth, with your paltry one moon. But Saturn’s coolest moon of all just might be Iapetus. This 914-mile-wide hunk of rock is bright on one side and dark on the other, and its lighter hemisphere is as much as 20 times more reflective than its darker hemisphere. As it happens, the bright side is actually ice. The dark side…well, that’s more complicated, and theories abound. One is that the darkness comes from particles released by a different moon named Phoebe. Another, more recent speculation has to do with heat—namely, the moon is rotating so slowly that the moon’s dark material is absorbing heat and becoming ever darker.
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