| Title | Neptune Gets a New Moon, Thanks Hubble | |
| Date | Saturday February 23 2019, @02:35AM | |
| Author | martyb | |
| Topic | ||
| 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?
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