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Neptune’s smallest moon may be a chip off another moon

Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News

Neptune and Proteus
CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK Neptune’s second-largest moon, Proteus (small gray rock in this illustration), suffered a massive collision in its past that left it with a huge crater. That collision could have spawned a whole new moon.

Neptune’s smallest moon may be a chunk of a neighboring moon that was knocked off by a comet.

One of seven moons that orbit closer to Neptune than the planet’s largest moon, Triton, the newly dubbed Hippocamp is just roughly 34 kilometers across, researchers report in the Feb. 21 Nature. The second-largest moon, Proteus, is Hippocamp’s nearest neighbor, orbiting about 12,000 kilometers away.

“Why would such a small moon be so close to such a big moon?” wondered astronomer Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. He and his…

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