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

Moon Size

[Obfiscator]

Thirty to fourty kilometers? How small does an orbiting object have to be to not be considered a moon anymore?

That's no moon...

[baldass_newbie]

it's a space station!

(sorry. had to be done.)

Photos of Ice Volcano

[LudditeMind]

Here

Eh...I think your mistaken!

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

*snip*

moon-Triton-which is the coldest measured object in our solar system

*snip*

It is clear to me that NASA has not pointed thier little devices at my last CEO's heart....

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.