group of retrograde irregular satellites of Jupiter that follow similar orbits to Pasiphae and are thought to have a common origin
This diagram compares the orbital elements and relative sizes of the known members of the Pasiphae group as of April 2026. The horizontal axis illustrates their average distance from Jupiter, the vertical axis their orbital inclination, and the circles their relative sizes. 107 irregular moons of Jupiter plotted by semi-major axis and inclination as of April 2026. The Pasiphae group is shown as a diffuse cluster of gray-colored points on the left. The Pasiphae group (or family or cluster) is a group of retrograde irregular satellites of Jupiter, named after its largest member, Pasiphae. The group is usually thought to have formed from a captured asteroid that later split into many fragments in a collision, making them a collisional family. Though the moons follow somewhat similar orbits, their orbital dispersion is still very large, and additionally the moons with measured colours show significant colour diversity, making the identification of the group and a common origin open to discussion. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) reserves names ending in -e for all retrograde moons of Jupiter, which includes all those in the Pasiphae group.
Characteristics and origin
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).