Meet Hippocamp, "The moon that should not be there"

Moon Boon

In 2013, scientists discovered a tiny moon orbiting Neptune. They gave it the forgotten name S / 2004 N 1, but it quickly gained the nickname "the moon should not be there" because its size and location made no sense to astronomers.

Now, a team of planetary scientists has not only attributed a more memorable nickname to the 14th moon of Neptune – Hippocamp – but it has also revealed some of the mysteries surrounding its origin.

Tiny, but fast

In an article published Wednesday in the newspaper Nature, the researchers shared the results of several years of analysis on Neptune's smaller moon.

According to their research, Hippocamp is only 20 miles in diameter and one-thousandth of the mass of Proteus, the much larger moon next to it. It also bypasses Neptune at a speed of about 20,000 miles an hour, which is 10 times faster than our moon revolves around the Earth.

The new name, meanwhile, refers to a mythological marine creature half horse and half fish, making it a moon orbiting the planet that bears the name of the Roman god of the sea.

Splinter Satellite

So that's what the researchers learned about Hippocamp, but that does not answer the question of why "the moon should not be there" is The.

The answer, according to the researchers, is that this was probably not always the case.

If Hippocamp existed about 4 billion years ago, Proteus would probably have destroyed the smallest moon while cleaning its orbit around Neptune. This led the researchers to conclude that Hippocamp probably was formed when a piece of Proteus was detached as a result of a collision with a comet or an asteroid.