Phobos and Deimos in fiction Swift. In recognition of these mentions, many geological features of Phobos and Deimos are named after characters and places from "Gulliver's Travels", including among others "Laputa Regio" and "Lagado Planitia" on Phobos, and craters Swift and Voltaire on Deimos. Phobos and Deimos in fiction Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Due to their small size, both moons were discovered only in 1877, by astronomer Asaph Hall. Nevertheless, they frequently feature in works of science fiction. Some of the earliest mentions of Mars's moons in fiction predate their discovery. In Jonathan Swift's famous satire "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), the astronomers of
Definition of planet object can be irregular in shape, but beyond that point gravity begins to pull an object towards its own centre of mass until the object collapses into an ellipsoid. (None of the large objects of the Solar System are truly spherical. Many are spheroids, and several, such as the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn and the dwarf planet , have been further distorted into ellipsoids by rapid rotation or tidal forces, but still in hydrostatic equilibrium.) However, there is no precise point at which an object can be said to have reached hydrostatic equilibrium. As Soter noted in his