New Neptune Moon Discovered by Hubble Space Telescope

NASA has announced the discovery of a new moon around the planet Neptune. The new Neptunian moon, named S/2004 N 1 for now, was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope as seen in this image.

The new moon for Neptune make at total of 14 moons which appear to be in orbit around the furthest planet from the Sun in our solar system.

According to the NASA press release, S/2004 N 1 is very small compared to other moons around Neptune at an estimate of only 12 miles across.

Additionally, the new moon is much fainter, as seen in this picture, than its counterparts. Its light, says NASA, “is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye.”

The discovery was reportedly made by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California on July 1, as he was studying the faint arcs, or segments of rings, around Neptune. “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.”

Showalter has determined that the new moon orbits Neptune at a rate of one revolution every 23 hours, and is located 65,400 miles from Neptune between the orbits of the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus.

To find the new moon, Showalter went through more 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009. He then tracked the movement of a white dot that appears over and over again in these images.