Hubble Space Telescope spots another moon orbiting Neptune

Get ready for a new naming contest! Astronomers with SETI — the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence — just confirmed that they've found a 14th moon orbiting the planet Neptune.

Say hello to S/2004 N 1, which SETI astronomer Mark Showalter found on July 1st. This tiny satellite is only around 20 kilometres wide, it was found orbiting between the moons Larissa and Proteus, and it goes around Neptune every 23 hours.

When Showalter spotted this tiny dot, which the Hubble website says "is roughly one hundred million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye," he wasn't even looking for it. He was using the powerful space telescope to track the planet's faint ring arcs.

"The moons 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," he said. "It's the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete — the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs."

Looking at the footage of his study, which he had expanded out, far beyond the ring system purely on a whim, he noticed an extra white dot between Larissa and Proteus. Following up, he went back through the Hubble records of Neptune from 2004 to 2009. Showalter saw that the telescope had actually picked up images of the moon in 2004, although noone noticed it at the time. It was even missed during Voyager 2's flyby of the planet in 1989.

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Showalter was the same astronomer who led the team that discovered the two newest moons of Pluto, which, also thanks to him and the others at SETI, are now named Kerberos and Styx. Hopefully, that means that we'll be seeing another contest in the works to name this newly-discovered moon (although according to CBC News, it will take a few months for Showalter to write up his findings and get them published).

Since the names of Neptune's moons are based on Greek mythology of the oceans, personally, I'd name the moon either Phthios, who was a son of Poseidon and the nymph Larissa, or Eidothea, the daughter of Proteus.

(Images courtesy: NASA, ESA, A. Feil/Z. Levay/STScI/AURA)

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