Hubble Space Telescope composite picture showing the location of a newly discovered moon, designated S/2004 N 1. The third moon, later named Larissa, was first observed by Harold J. Kuiper (for whom the Kuiper Belt is named) using photographic plates from the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas. The first was Nereid, Neptune’s second largest and most massive moon, which was discovered on May 1st, 1949, by Gerard P. It would be almost a century before any other moons would be discovered. It was observed by William Lassell on October 10th, 1846, just seventeen days after Neptune was discovered. Triton, being the largest and most massive of Neptune’s moons, was the first to be discovered. Neptune now has 14 recognized satellites, and in honor of of their parent planet, all are named for minor water deities in Greek mythology. But by the mid-20th century and after, thanks to improvements in ground-based telescopes and the development of robotic space probes, many more moons would be discovered. Initially, only Triton – Neptune’s largest moon – could be observed. And just seventeen days after it was discovered, astronomers began to notice that it too had a system of moons. In keeping with the convention of planetary nomenclature, Neptune was named after the Roman god of the sea (the equivalent to the Greek Poseidon).
“It’s a freakishly weird configuration.Neptune, that icy gas giant that is the eighth planet from our Sun, was discovered in 1846 by two astronomers – Urbain Le Verrier and Johann Galle. “For me it's always exciting to see the universe comes up with crazier solutions to a problem than we humans might think of,” Showalter said. Indeed, the finding was surprising, and pleasant, for researchers. "Only later, after its orbital tilt was established, could Naiad settle into this unusual resonance withThalassa."
"We suspect that Naiad was kicked into its tilted orbit by an earlier interaction with one of Neptune's other inner moons," Brozovic added.
Researchers suspect that Naiad joined Neptune after an interaction with another one of Neptune’s inner moons. Neso, the farthest of them all, orbits in an elliptical loop nearly 46 million miles (74 million kilometers) away from the planet. Neptune has 14 moons that we know of today. Naiad orbits Neptune 73 times for every 69 times that Thalassa goes around Neptune. Researchers also found that the relationship between these two moons not only one is tilted, Showalter said, but the number of orbits are peculiar, too. The research provides the first insights of their kind regarding the internal workings of Neptune’s inner moons. This peculiar pattern was discovered as researchers analyzed observational data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "There are many different types of 'dances' that planets, moons and asteroids can follow, but this one has never been seen before." "We refer to this repeating pattern as a resonance," Marina Brozovic, an expert in solar system dynamics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the lead author of the new paper, said in a media statement. According to the researchers, the orbit would look like an up-and-down zig-zag pattern to an observer. During this so-called dance of avoidance, Naiad circles Neptune every seven hours. Naiad's orbit is tilted and perfectly timed to pass its slower-moving partner, Thalassa, while maintaining a distance of about 2,200 miles apart. ‘They are much more stable if they don't get too close, and what we found is two moon going to extraordinary lengths just to avoid each other.” “The big picture is that moons don't like to get too close to each other when they orbit a planet,” Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and a co-author of the new paper, told Salon. It turns out the same can be said about a neighboring planet's moons.Īccording to new research published in the journal Icarus last month, two of Neptune’s tiny moons - Naiad and Thalassa - orbit in an unprecedented way that scientists are calling a "dance of avoidance.” The study calls the two moons "partners," noting that though they orbit only about 1,150 miles apart - approximately the distance from San Diego to Seattle - they never get close enough to touch each other. It takes two to tango, or so they say of humans.
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