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A telescope or strong binoculars will resolve Neptune as a small blue disk, similar in appearance to Uranus. [179] Because of the distance of Neptune from Earth, its angular diameter only ranges from 2.2 to 2.4 arcseconds, [8] [20] the smallest of the Solar System planets. Its small apparent size makes it challenging to study visually.
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.
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.
A celestial object's axial tilt indicates whether the object's rotation is prograde or retrograde. Axial tilt is the angle between an object's rotation axis and a line perpendicular to its orbital plane passing through the object's centre. An object with an axial tilt up to 90 degrees is rotating in the same direction as its primary.
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 ...
In this hypothesis, as the binary system approaches Neptune, it becomes unbound by tidal forces; one component of the binary is ejected from the system, and Triton is captured into a highly eccentric orbit around Neptune. For this to occur, the escaping companion must be massive enough to provide the impulse needed for a single pass capture ...
The term retrograde is from the Latin word retrogradus – "backward-step", the affix retro-meaning "backwards" and gradus "step". Retrograde is most commonly an adjective used to describe the path of a planet as it travels through the night sky, with respect to the zodiac, stars, and other bodies of the celestial canopy. In this context, the ...
In astronomy, a resonant trans-Neptunian object is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) in mean-motion orbital resonance with Neptune.The orbital periods of the resonant objects are in a simple integer relations with the period of Neptune, e.g. 1:2, 2:3, etc. Resonant TNOs can be either part of the main Kuiper belt population, or the more distant scattered disc population.