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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, hazy atmosphere. Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde orbit—revolving in the opposite direction to the parent planet's rotation—the only large moon in the Solar System to do so.
Objects in this resonance complete 2 orbits for every 3 of Neptune, and are known as plutinos because the largest of the known Kuiper belt objects, Pluto, is among them. [148] Although Pluto crosses Neptune's orbit regularly, the 2:3 resonance makes it so that they can never collide. [149] The 3:4, 3:5, 4:7 and 2:5 resonances are less populated ...
In astronomy, the rotation period or spin period [1] of a celestial object (e.g., star, planet, moon, asteroid) has two definitions. The first one corresponds to the sidereal rotation period (or sidereal day ), i.e., the time that the object takes to complete a full rotation around its axis relative to the background stars ( inertial space ).
Triton was discovered by William Lassell in 1846, just seventeen days after the discovery of Neptune. [3] Nereid was discovered by Gerard P. Kuiper in 1949. [4] The third moon, later named Larissa, was first observed by Harold J. Reitsema, William B. Hubbard, Larry A. Lebofsky and David J. Tholen on 24 May 1981.
Venus rotates clockwise, and Uranus has been knocked on its side and rotates almost perpendicular to the rest of the Solar System. The ecliptic remains within 3° of the invariable plane over five million years, [2] but is now inclined about 23.44° to Earth's celestial equator used for the coordinates of poles. This large inclination means ...
To address this, in 1979 a team of astronomers led by P. Farinella proposed a "hybrid" model, where only Pluto was an indigenous satellite of Neptune and Triton is a captured object. [2]: 419–420 Alternatively, astronomers R. S. Harrington and T. C. van Flandern proposed that same year that an encounter with a rogue object several times more ...
Proteus is the second-largest moon of Neptune and is the largest of its regular prograde moons. It is about 420 km (260 mi) in diameter, larger than Nereid , Neptune's third-largest moon. It was not discovered by Earth -based telescopes because Proteus orbits so close to Neptune that it is lost in the glare of reflected sunlight.
Another common form of resonance in the Solar System is spin–orbit resonance, where the rotation period (the time it takes the planet or moon to rotate once about its axis) has a simple numerical relationship with its orbital period. An example is the Moon, which is in a 1:1 spin–orbit resonance that keeps its far side away from Earth ...