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Neptune's second-known satellite (by order of discovery), the irregular moon Nereid, has one of the most eccentric orbits of any satellite in the Solar System. The eccentricity of 0.7512 gives it an apoapsis that is seven times its periapsis distance from Neptune. [j] From July to September 1989, Voyager 2 discovered six moons of Neptune. [162]
The nickname "Wizard's Eye" given to this storm comes from its distinct features which create a striking eye-like appearance. [6] Overall the Small Dark Spot is significantly smaller but on the same order of magnitude as the Great Dark Spot and rotates about 30° further south and with a period about 2 hours shorter than the larger storm.
The new planet, at first called "Le Verrier" by François Arago, received by consensus the neutral name of Neptune. Its mathematical prediction was a great intellectual feat, but it showed also that Newton's law of gravitation, which Airy had almost called in question, prevailed even at the limits of the Solar System. [20]
The scattered disc was created when Neptune migrated outward into the proto-Kuiper belt, which at the time was much closer to the Sun, and left in its wake a population of dynamically stable objects that could never be affected by its orbit (the Kuiper belt proper), and a population whose perihelia are close enough that Neptune can still ...
Voyager 2/ISS images of Uranus and Neptune released shortly after the Voyager 2 flybys in 1986 and 1989, respectively, compared with a reprocessing of the individual filter images in this study to ...
Neptune and its moon Triton, taken by Voyager 2. Triton's orbit will eventually take it within Neptune's Roche limit, tearing it apart and possibly forming a new ring system. A different scenario occurs when the moon is either revolving around the primary faster than the primary rotates or is revolving in the direction opposite the planet's ...
Image credits: an1malpulse #5. Animal campaigners are calling for a ban on the public sale of fireworks after a baby red panda was thought to have died from stress related to the noise.
Meteoroids in a retrograde orbit around the Sun hit the Earth with a faster relative speed than prograde meteoroids and tend to burn up in the atmosphere and are more likely to hit the side of the Earth facing away from the Sun (i.e. at night) whereas the prograde meteoroids have slower closing speeds and more often land as meteorites and tend ...