Neptune's newest moon may be chip off a larger moon
- 5 years ago
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — Neptune's official moon count is now up to 14, after a team of astronomers used NASA's Hubble Space telescope to shed some much needed light on the mini satellite.
According to a press release from the SETI Institute, a tiny moon discovered orbiting Neptune in 2013 has now been named Hippocamp. It is one of the planet's seven inner moons, and the newest of its 14 known moons.
Naming conventions for the Neptune system require something out of Greco-Roman undersea mythology. In Greek mythology, Hippocamp is a half fish, half horse creature.
It's related to Hippocampus, which is the scientific name for the seahorse, and the name of a major component of the human brain that's seahorse-shaped.
Hippocamp measures about 34 kilometers across, and is 1/1000th the mass of Proteus, which at 418 kilometers across is Neptune's largest inner satellite.
The small moon was observed to be orbiting unusually close to Proteus, even though such a large moon should have gravitationally swept it aside and cleared its orbital path.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, SETI researchers hypothesized that Hippocamp is a fragment of Proteus that broke off following a collision with a comet billions of years ago.
According to a press release from the SETI Institute, a tiny moon discovered orbiting Neptune in 2013 has now been named Hippocamp. It is one of the planet's seven inner moons, and the newest of its 14 known moons.
Naming conventions for the Neptune system require something out of Greco-Roman undersea mythology. In Greek mythology, Hippocamp is a half fish, half horse creature.
It's related to Hippocampus, which is the scientific name for the seahorse, and the name of a major component of the human brain that's seahorse-shaped.
Hippocamp measures about 34 kilometers across, and is 1/1000th the mass of Proteus, which at 418 kilometers across is Neptune's largest inner satellite.
The small moon was observed to be orbiting unusually close to Proteus, even though such a large moon should have gravitationally swept it aside and cleared its orbital path.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, SETI researchers hypothesized that Hippocamp is a fragment of Proteus that broke off following a collision with a comet billions of years ago.