New tiny moon found orbiting faraway Neptune

Associated Press ^ | Jul 15, 2013 4:08 PM EDT | Marcia Dunn

[Olog-hai]

Chalk up one more moon for Neptune.

NASA announced the discovery of Neptune’s 14^th moon Monday. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the moon as a white dot in photos of Neptune on the outskirts of our solar system.

The new moon—Neptune’s tiniest at just 12 miles across—is designated S/2004 N 1. …

[ClearCase_guy]

I figured I wouldn’t be fast enough to post that comment, and I was right.

[GraceG]

If I were to park an intersetellar asteroid ship around a planet, I would park it around a gas giant because you could easily refuel the engines with the abundant hydrogen gas and the many moons around a gas giant provide a lot of mineral weath for mining...

Just saying...

I really have to wonder sometimes.... I wonder, but belife if beyond my grasp until I can see it with my own eyes...

[HenpeckedCon]

“Plus you would think Voyager 1 and/or V2 would have shown something as well.”

The scuttlebutt is that Voyager VI was supposed to find it, but Hubble found it and changed history. This is Hugh and Series. It might knock back our invention of warp drive for two centuries.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Are they gonna name it after Saint Skittles ?

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Olog-hai.

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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Olog-hai. Extra to APoD members.

[SunkenCiv]

Should wind up named Enuten.

[SunkenCiv]

There are prediscovery photos of Pluto and many other bodies such as asteroids and comets — they got missed by someone (sometimes even by the eventual discoverer) who wasn’t at the time looking for it. Prediscovery photos are handy for figuring out the orbit and orbital period of newly discovered bodies. And before photography:

Galileo’s prediscovery of Neptune
http://eotvos.dm.unipi.it/galileo%20neptune%20SAit%202009.pdf