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from the I-wonder-if-that-impact-was-at-650m/s dept.
Mark Showalter, a researcher at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, analyzing Hubble images of Neptune has revealed a previously undetected moon, bringing the icy blue planet's count to 14.
The new moon is dubbed Hippocamp, after the fish tailed horses from Greek Mythology.
The discovery was published in the journal Nature
Mark...did not set out to make this discovery. He was analyzing Neptune’s rings with a new technique to process old images that essentially twisted them while adding them together. That allowed him to better see the rings, which are both faint and quick-moving.
On a whim, he decided to apply that same technique to other parts of the image he produced. To his surprise, a tiny white dot appeared.
Further analyses have confirmed that it is a moon, and a rather odd one.
Hippocamp is flat, tiny (only 527 ice hockey rinks in diameter, or about 20 miles), and in a fast orbit that is too near to Proteus. This leads to speculation that it was a fragment broken free from Proteus billions of years ago by an impact, possibly with some refugee from the Kuiper belt.
[This provides] further support for the hypothesis that the inner Neptune system has been shaped by numerous impacts.
Flat and icy, whatever could we use that for?
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Saturday February 23 2019, @02:52AM (3 children)
*muses* Excluding the Sun and gas giants where you really can't tell, wasn't EVERYTHING in the solar system largely shaped by numerous impacts.
I wonder why it's special that Neptune's system got a pasting?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 23 2019, @06:02AM (2 children)
It could be about the timing. There were plenty of collisions early in the life of the solar system, but things have settled down. Yet you still get events like Neptune apparently capturing Triton, or the formation of Saturn's rings, a transient phenomenon that could be mostly gone in 100 million year.
Neptune is special for being the outermost (official) planet in the solar system, and having the largest known Hill sphere in the solar system (excluding the Sun).
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 23 2019, @07:10AM (1 child)
If there is a Planet 9, does that make Neptune less special? Planet 9 would have an even larger Hill sphere, would it not?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday February 23 2019, @04:41PM
Yes. If Planet Nine exists in an orbit many times beyond Neptune's, it could end up having hundreds of moons due to its large Hill sphere. Or not if material is sparse there.
But Neptune has a large influence on the Kuiper belt due to its proximity to it. It is crowd control for a group of icy bodies much more massive than the asteroid belt and a lot closer than a Planet Nine would be. So it has that going for it.
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