14 DAY TRIAL // While astronomers tend to focus on the Universe beyond our Solar System, it seems that there are still secrets hidden in our own neighborhood. Neptune has another moon that no one knew about until now.
Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows that Neptune has another moon, senior research scientist Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute says.
The new Neptune moon was discovered on July 1.
“The moon and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system. It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete – the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs,” Showalter said in a NASA-released statement.
According to Showalter, the procedure he devised predicts where any moon ought to move from one image to the next and then combines the images to compensate for the expected motion.
When he expanded his analysis on a region beyond Neptune’s ring system, another dot turned up, over and over again, indicating the presence of yet another moon.
Now, S/2004 N 1, as it was named by astronomers, is Neptune’s 14th known moon and the smallest.
Given the fact that most of what was known about Neptune dates back to the Voyager 2 trip back in 1989, the new information about its moons isn’t exactly surprising.
The new moon is located between Proteus and Larissa, the second and third-largest moons of Neptune.
NASA has also revealed an image of the new moon and how it is positioned compared to the other known moons of the eighth planet from the Sun.
Neptune is the fourth-largest planet by diameter and number three by mass. It has roughly 17 times the mass of Earth, but only a fraction of Jupiter’s.