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The Kuiper belt is a ring of small icy worlds, similar to the asteroid belt but far larger, extending from Neptune's orbit at 30 AU out to about 55 AU from the Sun. [145] Much in the same way that Jupiter's gravity dominates the asteroid belt, Neptune's gravity dominates the Kuiper belt. Over the age of the Solar System, certain regions of the ...
Neso / ˈ n iː s oʊ /, also known as Neptune XIII, is the second-outermost known natural satellite of Neptune, after S/2021 N 1.It is a retrograde irregular moon discovered by Matthew J. Holman, Brett J. Gladman, et al. on 14 August 2002, though it went unnoticed until 2003.
In 1848, Jacques Babinet raised an objection to Le Verrier's calculations, claiming that Neptune's observed mass was smaller and its orbit larger than Le Verrier had initially predicted. He postulated, based largely on simple subtraction from Le Verrier's calculations, that another planet of roughly 12 Earth masses, which he named "Hyperion ...
Naiad, the closest regular moon, is also the second smallest among the inner moons (following the discovery of Hippocamp), whereas Proteus is the largest regular moon and the second largest moon of Neptune. The first five moons orbit much faster than Neptune's rotation itself ranging from 7 hours for Naiad and Thalassa, to 13 hours for Larissa.
Neptune's rings had been observed from Earth many years prior to Voyager 2 's visit, but the close inspection revealed that the ring systems were full circle and intact, and a total of four rings were counted. [4] Voyager 2 discovered six new small moons orbiting Neptune's equatorial plane, dubbed Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea, Larissa and ...
Nereid's highly eccentric orbit around Neptune. The unusual orbit suggests that it may be either a captured asteroid or Kuiper belt object, or that it was an inner moon in the past and was perturbed during the capture of Neptune's largest moon Triton. [13] If the latter is true, it may be the only survivor of Neptune's original (pre-Triton ...
S/2021 N 1 is the smallest, faintest, and most distant natural satellite of Neptune known, with a diameter of around 16–25 km (10–16 mi). It was discovered on 7 September 2021 by Scott S. Sheppard, David J. Tholen, Chad Trujillo, and Patryk S. Lykawka using the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and later announced on 23 February 2024. [1]
Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and is slightly more massive than its near-twin Uranus, which is 15 times the mass of Earth and slightly larger than Neptune. [a] Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at an average distance of 30.1 astronomical units (4.50 × 10 9 km).