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Some of these bodies have exactly the same name, referring to the same mythological character. The earliest such conflicts possibly arose through not considering certain mythological names as "official"; for instance, the names Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto for the Galilean satellites of Jupiter were not used in astronomical literature of a certain era, their place being taken by Jupiter I ...
Proteus (/ ˈ p r oʊ t i ə s / PROH-tee-əs), also known as Neptune VIII, is the second-largest Neptunian moon, and Neptune's largest inner satellite. Discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989, it is named after Proteus , the shape-changing sea god of Greek mythology . [ 11 ]
The bright S/2002 N5 moon is 14 miles (23 kilometers) in diameter and takes nearly nine years to complete an orbit of Neptune, while faint S/2021 N1 is about 8.7 miles (14 kilometers) across and ...
It is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol, representing Neptune's trident. [e] Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye and is the only planet in the Solar System that was not initially observed by direct empirical observation.
Nereid, or Neptune II, is the third-largest moon of Neptune. It has the most eccentric orbit of all known moons in the Solar System . [ 4 ] It was the second moon of Neptune to be discovered, by Gerard Kuiper in 1949.
Larissa, also known as Neptune VII, is the fifth-closest inner satellite of Neptune. It is named after Larissa , a lover of Poseidon (the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Neptune ). Larissa is also the eponymous nymph of the city in Thessaly , Greece .
The moon is named after the hippocampus, a mythological creature depicted as having the upper body of a horse with the lower body of a fish in Greek mythology. [10] The hippocampus symbolizes the Greek sea god Poseidon as well as the Roman sea god Neptune. [11] [10] In Roman mythology, Neptune would often drive a sea-chariot pulled by ...
Thalassa is irregularly shaped. It is likely that it is a rubble pile re-accreted from fragments of Neptune's original satellites, which were smashed up by perturbations from Triton soon after that moon's capture into a very eccentric initial orbit. [11] Unusually for irregular bodies, it appears to be roughly disk-shaped.