Neptune’s Moon May Have Survived Ancient Cataclysmic Event

Neptune's moon Nereid may be the sole survivor of an ancient set of moons, according to new findings from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

NEED TO KNOW

• Neptune’s moon Nereid may be the lone survivor of an ancient cataclysmic event, scientists have discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope
• Neptune has the most unique configuration of moons in our solar system
• Scientists now believe Nereid does not bear the markings of an object from the Kuiper belt, but instead could be ancient

Neptune's moon Nereid may be the lone survivor of an ancient cataclysmic event, according to new findings from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Neptune has long stood out among the outer planets in the solar system due to its unique configuration of moons, CNN reported, citing the findings from the James Webb Space Telescope.

As the planet farthest from the sun, Neptune's largest moon, Triton, is significantly larger than the other satellite objects that orbit the planet, and Triton is the only object that orbits in its own direction, per the outlet.

Astronomers have suspected that Triton came from the Kuiper belt, "a doughnut-shaped region of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune," according to NASA. The Kuiper belt is also home to Pluto and "most of the known dwarf planets and some comets."

However, scientists could not connect Nereid, another of Neptune's irregular moons, to the Kuiper belt due in part to its vibrant blue hue, as most objects from the belt tend to be red in color, according to a new study published in Science Advances on Wednesday, May 20. Nereid is also believed to be 210 miles in diameter.

When a team led by Matthew Belyakov, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology, used the James Webb Space Telescope to look at Nereid, they reported in their findings that the moon was "inconsistent with its suggested captured origin" from the Kuiper belt.

Instead, Belyakov's team proposes that Neptune once had a more regular set of moons that were largely destroyed in an ancient cataclysmic event, leaving Nereid as the lone survivor.

“The other survivors are Neptune’s innermost moons, but they are not intact because we have images of them from Voyager, and they look like disrupted rubble piles," Belyakov told CNN. "So they are surviving material from the initial system, but not fully intact moons.”

To fully understand the origin of Nereid, further observation via a spacecraft would be required, according to The New York Times.

“It’s a criminally understudied moon,” Dr. Belyakov told the outlet.

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Nereid takes its name from the sea nymphs of Greek mythology, who served Neptune, the god of the sea, much like the moon orbits the planet, per CNN.

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