Phoebe, midsize irregular moon of Saturn, discovered by the American astronomer William Henry Pickering in 1899 on photographic plates and named for a Titan in Greek mythology.
Roughly spherical and about 210 km (130 miles) in diameter, Phoebe has a mean distance from Saturn of about 12,952,000 km (8,050,000 miles), which is several times farther than any of Saturn’s other major moons; it takes about 1.5 Earth years to complete one trip around Saturn. Its orbit is significantly eccentric, retrograde, and steeply inclined to the plane of Saturn’s rings and regular moons.
Phoebe’s surface shows large differences in reflectivity but is dark overall. Infrared spectral observations reveal the presence of water ice particles mixed with dark material resembling the carbon-rich material seen on primitive C-class asteroids. Some of the moon’s craters show evidence of alternating surface layers of bright and dark material. Phoebe has a mean density roughly 1.6 times that of pure water ice, higher than the density of most of Saturn’s icy major moons. This finding and Phoebe’s irregular orbital properties suggest to some scientists that the moon did not form in orbit around Saturn but was captured after having formed in a more distant orbit from the Sun, where temperatures and carbon-oxygen chemistry were different.
Dust from impacts on Phoebe are the source of Saturn’s outermost ring, which extends from 7.3 to 11.8 million km (4.6 to 7.4 million miles) from Saturn—the largest planetary ring in the solar system. The Spitzer Space Telescope discovered this ring; its observations showed an extremely tenuous optical depth of 2 × 10−8. The ring has the same inclination as Phoebe’s orbit, and particles from the ring that spiral inward toward Saturn cause the marked asymmetry in brightness of the two hemispheres of Iapetus.