New Moon Found Orbiting Neptune

Dave Knott writes "A tiny, previously unknown moon circling Neptune has been spotted by astronomers using the Hubble telescope. The moon, which is currently known as S/2004 N1, was found on July 1 by Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., NASA announced Monday. It is less than 20 kilometres wide and its orbit is 105,000 kilometres from Neptune, between those of Larissa and Proteus, two of Neptune's other 14 known moons. It circles Neptune once every 23 hours."

But wait...

[ls671]

Since Pluto is not a planet anymore, we shouldn't be allowed to call a 20 km wide rock a moon. Let's have a big convention to decide how we should call it.

Meh....

[yo303]

I like our moon better.

But honestly I have not been to either.

Re:Planets and moons are just objects

[JaredOfEuropa]

Capturing everything observable in orderly lists (based on the mechanics of the underlying model) is science. Calling planets and moons "objects" is akin to discovering more and more kinds of atoms and particles and deciding to call everything just "stuff" because it doesn't fit your model anymore. The right answer is to rethink the definitions and perhaps alter the model. The distinction between planets and moons is still a useful one even if we found a few cases where we're not sure how we should classify them.

Re:Meh....

[AlecC]

Or living on a lump of earth called "Earth" orbiting a sun called "Sun" in a universe called "the Universe".