Pasipha

Pasipha is a genus of land planarians from South America.

Description

Species of the genus Pasipha have a slender and flattened body with parallel margins while creeping. The copulatory apparatus lacks a permanent penis, having a long and highly folded male atrium instead. The prostatic vesicle is located outside the muscular coat of the copulatory apparatus and divided in two portions. The female canal enters the genital antrum ventrally.

Species

There are 16 species assigned to the genus Paraba:

Pasiphaë

In Greek mythology, Pasiphaë (/pəˈsɪfᵻ.iː/;Greek: Πασιφάη Pasipháē, "wide-shining") was the daughter of Helios, the Sun, by the eldest of the Oceanids, Perse.

Family

Like her doublet Europa, her origins were in the East, in her case at Colchis, she was the sister of Circe, and she was given in marriage to King Minos of Crete. With Minos, she was the mother of Acacallis, Ariadne, Androgeus, Glaucus, Deucalion, Phaedra, Xenodice, and Catreus. She was also the mother of "starlike" Asterion, called by the Greeks the Minotaur, after a curse from Poseidon caused her to experience lust for and mate with a white bull sent by Poseidon."The Bull was the old pre-Olympian Poseidon," Ruck and Staples remark.

In the Greek literalistic understanding of a Minoan myth, in order to actually copulate with the bull, she had the Athenian artificer Daedalus construct a portable wooden cow with a cowhide covering, within which she was able to satisfy her strong desire. The effect of the Greek interpretation was to reduce a more-than-human female, daughter of the Sun itself, to a stereotyped emblem of grotesque bestiality and the shocking excesses of female sensuality and deceit. Pasiphaë appeared in Virgil's Eclogue VI (45–60), in Silenus' list of suitable mythological subjects, on which Virgil lingers in such detail that he gives the sixteen-line episode the weight of a brief inset myth. In Ovid's Ars Amatoria Pasiphaë is reduced to unflattering human terms: Pasiphae fieri gaudebat adultera tauri—"Pasiphaë took pleasure in becoming an adulteress with a bull."

Pasiphae (moon)

Pasiphae (/pəˈsɪfə.iː/ pə-SIF-ə-ee;Greek: Πασιφάη; formerly Pasiphaë) is a retrograde irregular satellite of Jupiter. It was discovered in 1908 by Philibert Jacques Melotte and later named after the mythological Pasiphaë, wife of Minos and mother of the Minotaur from Greek legend.

It was first spotted on a plate taken at the Royal Greenwich Observatory on the night of February 28, 1908. Inspection of previous plates found it as far back as January 27. It received the provisional designation 1908 CJ, as it was not clear whether it was an asteroid or a moon of Jupiter. The recognition of the latter case came by April 10.

Pasiphae did not receive its present name until 1975; before then, it was simply known as Jupiter VIII. It was sometimes called "Poseidon" between 1955 and 1975.

Orbit

Pasiphae orbits Jupiter on a high eccentricity and high inclination retrograde orbit. It gives its name to the Pasiphae group, irregular retrograde moons orbiting Jupiter at distances ranging between 22.8 and 24.1 million km, and with inclinations ranging between 144.5° and 158.3°. The orbital elements are as of January 2000. They are continuously changing due to solar and planetary perturbations. The diagram illustrates its orbit in relation to other retrograde irregular satellites of Jupiter. The eccentricity of selected orbits is represented by the yellow segments (extending from the pericentre to the apocentre). The outermost regular satellite Callisto is located for reference.