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An annotated picture of some of Neptune's many moons as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. The bright blue diffraction star is Triton, Neptune's largest moon; while Hippocamp, its smallest regular moon, is too small to be seen. The planet Neptune has 16 known moons, which are named for minor water deities and a water creature in Greek ...
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.
Temperature. ~51 K mean (estimate) Apparent magnitude. 21.9 [9] Galatea / ɡæləˈtiːə /, also known as Neptune VI, is the fourth-closest inner moon of Neptune, and fifth-largest moon of Neptune. It is named after Galatea, one of the fifty Nereids of Greek legend, with whom Cyclops Polyphemus was vainly in love.
Neso / ˈniːsoʊ /, also known as Neptune XIII, is the second-outermost known natural satellite of Neptune, after S/2021 N 1. It is a retrograde irregular moon discovered by Matthew J. Holman, Brett J. Gladman, et al. on 14 August 2002, though it went unnoticed until 2003. [ 2 ][ 8 ] Neso is the second-most distant moon of Neptune, with an ...
nitrogen; methane and carbon monoxide traces [ 12 ] Triton is the largest natural satellite of the planet Neptune. It is the only moon of Neptune massive enough to be rounded under its own gravity and hosts a thin but well-structured atmosphere. Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde orbit — revolving in the opposite direction to the parent ...
Hippocamp, also designated Neptune XIV, is a small moon of Neptune discovered on 1 July 2013. It was found by astronomer Mark Showalter by analyzing archived Neptune photographs the Hubble Space Telescope captured between 2004 and 2009. The moon is so dim that it was not observed when the Voyager 2 space probe flew by Neptune and its moons in 1989.
Five new irregular moons discovered between 2002 and 2003 were announced in 2004. [169] [170] A new moon and the smallest yet, Hippocamp, was found in 2013 by combining multiple Hubble images. [171] Because Neptune was the Roman god of the sea, Neptune's moons have been named after lesser sea gods. [54]
Despina's diameter is approximately 150 kilometres (93 mi). [4] Despina is irregularly shaped and shows no sign of any geological modification. It is likely that it is a rubble pile re-accreted from fragments of Neptune's original satellites, which were disrupted by perturbations from Triton soon after that moon's capture into a very eccentric initial orbit.