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A new moon for Neptune

Hippocamp, a previously undetected moon of Neptune, has a peculiar location and a tiny size relative to the planet’s other inner moons, which suggests a violent history for the region within 100,000 kilometres of the planet.
  1. Anne J. Verbiscer

    1. Anne J. Verbiscer is in the Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904, USA.

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In 1989, the NASA spacecraft Voyager 2 detected six moons of Neptune that are interior to the orbit of the planet’s largest moon, Triton1. In a paper in Nature, Showalter et al.2 report the discovery of a seventh inner moon, Hippocamp. Originally designated as S/2004 N 1 and Neptune XIV, this moon was found in images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2004–05 and 2009, and then confirmed in further images captured in 2016. Hippocamp is only 34 kilometres wide, which makes it diminutive compared with its larger siblings, and it orbits Neptune just inside the orbit of Proteus — the planet’s second largest moon.

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Nature 566, 328-329 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00576-1

References

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