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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.
Triton dominates the Neptunian moon system, with over 99.5% of its total mass. This imbalance may reflect the elimination of many of Neptune's original satellites following Triton's capture. [4][5] Triton (lower left) compared to the Moon (upper left) and Earth (right), to scale. Triton is the seventh-largest moon and sixteenth-largest object ...
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.
The bright blue diffraction star is Triton, Neptune's largest moon. Neptune has 16 known moons. [159] Triton is the largest Neptunian moon, accounting for more than 99.5% of the mass in orbit around Neptune, [i] and is the only one massive enough to be spheroidal.
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. [15]
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. [2] [8] Neso is the second-most distant moon of Neptune, with an average orbital distance of nearly 49.6 million km. At its farthest point of its orbit, the satellite is more than 72 million km from ...
Since S/2021 N 1's orbital inclination is greater than 90°, the moon has a retrograde orbit, meaning it orbits in the opposite direction of Neptune's orbit around the Sun. [5] Due to perturbations, S/2021 N 1's orbital elements fluctuate over time: its semi-major axis can range from 49 to 53 million km (30 to 33 million mi), eccentricity from ...
Discovery of Neptune. New Berlin Observatory at Linden Street, where Neptune was discovered observationally. Neptune as imaged by the Voyager 2 probe in 1989. The planet Neptune was mathematically predicted before it was directly observed. With a prediction by Urbain Le Verrier, telescopic observations confirming the existence of a major planet ...