Community Corner

Bay Area Man Discovers New Moon

Measuring more than 12 miles across, the distant moon is one of 14 orbiting the giant planet Neptune.

—By Rob Klindt

A sharp-eyed Bay Area man is being credited with discovering a new moon orbiting the planet Neptune which is more than 2.6 billion miles away from Earth. 

Officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced this week that Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View found the moon July 1.

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The moon, which is estimated to be more than 12 miles across, is the 14th known moon orbiting the distant blue-green planet, officials said on Tuesday, July 16.

According to NASA the moon is so small and dimly-lit that it was not detected by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft which flew past Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the giant planet’s system of moons and rings. 

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, Showalter was studying the faint arcs, or segments of rings, around Neptune when he made the discovery. On a whim Showalter extended his analysis outward to regions beyond the ring system, and noticed an extra white dot about 65,400 miles from Neptune, located between the orbits of the moons Larissa and Proteus.

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Showalter next analyzed more than 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009. The same white dot appeared over and over again. He then plotted a circular orbit for the moon, which completes one revolution around Neptune every 23 hours.



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