An astronomer studying archived images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has found a 14th moon orbiting the planet, NASA said on Monday.
Estimated to be about 12 miles in diameter, the moon is located about 65,400 miles from Neptune.
© Reuters/NASA/ESA/M. Showalter/SETI Institute/Handout via Reuters
The location of a newly discovered moon, designated S/2004 N 1, orbiting Neptune, is seen in this composite Hubble Space Telescope handout image taken in August 2009.
Astronomer Mark Showalter, with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was searching Hubble images for moons inside faint ring fragments circling Neptune when he decided to run his analysis program on a broader part of the sky.
"We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, 'OK, let's just look out further," Showalter told Reuters.
"I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn't supposed to be there," Showalter said.
Follow-up analysis of other archived Hubble images of Neptune verified the object was a moon.