![]() ![]() I know the burning question you have, and we had as well during the initial announcement today. Showalter told Universe Today, noting that there may still be some tantalizing clues waiting to be uncovered from the data. “We don’t quite have enough observations to establish a refined orbit,” Mr. Clearly, its motion is complex due to its interactions with Neptune’s other moons. It’s also intriguing to note that Naiad was discovered in a significantly different position in its orbit than expected. The Naiads differed from the saltwater-loving Nereids of mythology fame, after which another moon of Neptune discovered by Gerard Kuiper in 1949 was named. Naiad is named after the band of nymphs in Greek mythology who inhabited freshwater streams and ponds. In fact, the technique was also used to uncover the as of yet unnamed moon of Neptune, S/2004 N1 which was revealed earlier this year. Other moons, such as Galatea and Thalassa - which were also discovered during the 1989 Voyager 2 flyby - are also seen in the new images. To catch sight of the elusive inner moon, Showalter and team applied new analyzing techniques which filtered for glare and image artifacts that tend to “spill over” from behind the artificially occulted disk of Neptune. Voyager 2 has, to date, been the only mission to explore Uranus and Neptune. “Naiad has been an elusive target ever since Voyager left the Neptune system,” Showalter said in a recent SETI Institute press release. From our Earthly vantage point, Naiad only strays about arc second from the disk of Neptune, a tiny separation. Neptune itself is about 49,000 kilometres in diameter, and only appears 2.3” in size from Earth. It’s also the innermost of Neptune’s 14 known moons, and orbits once every 7 hours just 23,500 kilometres above the planet’s cloud tops. ![]() At roughly 100 kilometres in diameter and an apparent magnitude of +23.9, Naiad is over a million times fainter than +8th magnitude Neptune. The chief difficulty in recovering the diminutive moon was its relative faintness and proximity to the “dazzling” disk of Neptune. Triton is a potentially habitable world due to the presence of liquid water beneath its surface, along with the discovery of organic compounds on its surface.The findings were a tour-de-force of new techniques applied to old imagery, and combined the ground-based 10 meter Keck telescope in Hawaii as well as Hubble imagery stretching back to December 2004. This heat energy melts subsurface ice, creating a subsurface ocean of liquid water. Interestingly, the interior of Triton is believed to contain an abundance of radioactive material, which in turn decays and releases heat energy. Triton is covered in a thin crust, with the interior containing a solid core and a mantle. The interior of Triton is somewhat comparable to that of Earth. The interior of Triton is mostly water ice and rock. Water makes up between 15 and 35% of Triton’s crust, while the remaining composition is frozen carbon dioxide. The surface of Triton is covered in a layer of frozen nitrogen, with nitrogen making up about 55% of the moon’s crust. Triton’s composition is similar to dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, such as Pluto. Since Voyager 2 completed a flyby, astronomers were only able to map roughly 40% of Triton’s surface, and so there is still a lot of mystery surrounding this moon. To date, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is the only mission to ever visit Neptune and take images of the planet and its moons. Triton has only ever been seen by a single spacecraft. Composition Of Triton As Voyager 2 left Neptune, it snapped this stunning image of the gas giant along with Triton, which can be seen just below Neptune. Triton is also tidally locked to Neptune, meaning the moon has no rotation and one side constantly faces Neptune. It takes Triton roughly 5.8 Earth days to orbit Neptune. Eventually, it passed too close to Neptune and was caught in the planet’s gravity. Rather, Triton was likely a dwarf planet that orbited the sun in the Kuiper Belt. Since Triton moves the opposite direction, astronomers have deduced that Triton probably never formed in Neptune’s orbit. Moons slowly coalesced out of this material, which always orbits the same direction as the planet’s rotation. Moons that orbit the gas giants likely formed out of small disks of material that orbited the gas giants shortly after they formed. Neptune rotates counterclockwise, yet Triton orbits clockwise. ![]() In other words, Triton moves in a direction that is opposite to Neptune’s rotation. Unlike the vast majority of moons in the solar system, Triton moves in retrograde. Triton’s orbit is one of its most unique, fascinating features.
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