Astronomers have discovered a new Neptune moon.
According to Space.com , a never-before-seen moon was spotted near Neptune in archival images from the Hubble Telescope.
Neptune now has 14 known satellites. The newest moon is the smallest at just 12 miles wide.
SETI Institute scientist Mark Showalter, who discovered the new moon,said that S/2004 N 1 was very difficult to find.
Showalter said that he noticed the new moon while combing through images taken from 2004 too 2009. Showalter said that moon appeared in about 150 photos. With those photos he was able to plot the moon’s orbit and found that S/2004 N 1 orbited Neptune every 23 hours.
Showalter said : “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… It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete — the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs.”
Neptune’s new moon orbits the planet between the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus about 65,000 miles above the surface.
S/2004 N is only 12 miles wide which makes it absolutely miniscule compared to Neptune’s largest moon Titan. Titan, which is approximately 1,680 miles wide, is so big that some believe that it is actually a dwarf planet trapped in Neptune’s gravitational pull.
