Neptune's Got a Brand New Moon

Neptune's newly discovered 14th moon was there in the pictures all along. It just took Mark Showalter to see it.

Showalter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, was studying archival photos that the Hubble Space Telescope snapped of Neptune between 2004 and 2009. On July 1, while trying to get a better look at the faint rings of the eight planet from the sun, he spotted a diminutive dot appearing over and over again in the images. After a few quick calculations, Showalter figured out he was looking at a small undiscovered moon, the 14th natural satellite of Neptune.

The moon, named S/2004 N 1, is just 12 miles across. That small stature allowed it escape the eyes of the Voyager 2 during that spacecraft's 1989 Neptune flyby. Other scientists studying Neptune with Hubble didn't spot the satellite, either, but that's no surprise: the Hubble team reports that from Earth, the newly discovered moon is 100 million times fainter than the faintest star our naked eyes can see. The tiny moon orbits Neptune once every 23 hours.

The mouthful of a moniker S/2004 N 1 is just a temporary name for this new find. Showalter will get the honor of proposing a proper name for the wee moon to the International Astronomical Union. No word yet what he might choose, but the 13 neptunian moons already known to science are named from Greek and Roman water gods, led by massive, retrograde Triton, which was spotted just days after the discovery of Neptune itself back in the 1800s.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/neptunes-got-a-brand-new-moon-15695982?src=rss

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