Neptune's New Icy Companions

An anonymous reader writes "The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced new moons found around Neptune. The findings represent the first discovery of moons from ground-based telescopes in more than a half-century (1949), and required an international team to track and confirm. Notable about the ice-planet Neptune is also its largest moon-Triton-which is the coldest measured object in our solar system, and as a consequence even its volcanoes spew not lava, but ice."

Comments

Photos of Ice Volcano

[LudditeMind]

Here

Blurb misleadingly incomplete

[astroboscope]

The findings represent the first discovery of moons from ground-based telescopes in more than a half-century

around Neptune. The same people (more or less) involved in this discovery have also been finding previously unknown moons around Jupiter and Saturn, using Earth based telescopes.

The cool (hee hee) thing here is that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, appears to be a recently captured Kuiper Belt object. The orbits of Neptune's other satellites should have some "memory" of the capture. But this is a bit like putting a Swiss watch back together after it's been hit with a hammer.