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The bright blue diffraction star is Triton, Neptune's largest moon. Neptune has 16 known moons. [154] Triton is the largest Neptunian moon, accounting for more than 99.5% of the mass in orbit around Neptune, [i] and is the only one massive enough to be spheroidal. Triton was discovered by William Lassell just 17 days after the discovery of ...
In the 1990s, it was determined that Uranus and Neptune were a distinct class of giant planet, separate from the other giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, which are gas giants predominantly composed of hydrogen and helium. [1] Neptune and Uranus are now referred to as ice giants. Lacking well-defined solid surfaces, they are primarily composed ...
Secondly, they both have atypically small semi-major axes, with Triton's being over an order of magnitude smaller than those of all other known irregular moons. Thirdly, they both have unusual orbital eccentricities: Nereid has one of the most eccentric orbits of any known irregular satellite, and Triton's orbit is a nearly perfect circle.
Telescope data may have helped researchers figure out why. Four years ago, astronomers noticed the abundant clouds on Neptune had largely disappeared. Telescope data may have helped researchers ...
Neptune has long been known to have white clouds circling it, but images of the furthest planet in the solar system have shown this changing over time - the most recent image, taken by the Hubble ...
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In astronomy or planetary science, the frost line, also known as the snow line or ice line, is the minimum distance from the central protostar of a solar nebula where the temperature is low enough for volatile compounds such as water, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to condense into solid grains, which will allow their accretion into planetesimals.
[j] Also, with a diameter 5.5% that of Neptune, it is the largest moon of a gas giant relative to its planet in terms of diameter, although Titan is bigger relative to Saturn in terms of mass (the ratio of Triton's mass to that of Neptune is approximately 1:4788). It has a radius, density (2.061 g/cm 3), temperature, and chemical composition ...