Strange things happen in the cold twilight of the outer Solar System. In this distant region, four giant planets lure Earth watchers with their tantalizing treasure trove of enchanting, shocking, bizarre, and tremendously wonderful mysteries. The beautiful, banded blue ice giant Neptune is both the most distant giant planet from our Sun and the smallest of the quartet of gaseous outer worlds. But even by the strange standards of the outer Solar System, certain oddities stand out in this crowd of weirdos. Such an outstanding rarity is the strange waltz of avoidance performed by the innermost duo of Neptune’s icy moons. In November 2019, astronomers announced that the tiny Neptunian moons, Naiad Y Thalassa, are in orbits that take them only about 1,150 miles apart, but the two moons never get close enough to dance.
Orbital dynamics experts refer to this bizarre performance as an “avoidance dance.” The two small moons are close to each other, but nevertheless manage to stay far enough away to avoid a close encounter. This is because Naiad the orbit is tilted and perfectly synchronized. Every time this little moon goes through the slowest movement Thalassa, the duo are about 2,200 miles apart.
While this strange ballet of the moons is performed, Naiad it rotates around its parent planet every seven hours. Meanwhile, Thalassa’s dance along the outer path lasts seven and a half hours. If an earthling stood on Thalassa, and looked in awe at his strange alien sky, it would seem that Naiad The orbit creates a strange and wild zigzag pattern: it passes twice from above and then twice from below. This rather strange performance occurs over and over again as Naiad Acquire four laps on your partner Thalassa.
Although this distant dance may seem strange, it has a definite purpose. It keeps the orbits of small moons stable.
“We refer to this repeating pattern as a resonance. There are many different kinds of ‘dances’ that planets, moons and asteroids can follow, but this one has never been seen before, “commented Dr. Marina Brozovic in a NASA statement on November 14, 2019. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) press release. Dr. Brozovic is the lead author of the article describing this research, which was published on November 13, 2019, in the journal Icarus.
In the distant domain of the giant planets
In the distant domain of the quartet of giant planets, far from the powerful pull of our Star, the planets themselves are the main sources of gravity. Together, the gas quartet sports a myriad of mostly icy moons, and some of those moons were born at the same time as their parent planet, never migrating from their birthplace. In contrast, some of the other moons were trapped later in their planet’s history and later trapped in orbits controlled by their parent planets. Some of these many moons rotate in the opposite direction to your planet’s direction of rotation, while others swap orbits with each other as if to avoid catastrophic crushing.
The four giant planets of the outer Solar System are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Neptune and Uranus are classified as ice giants, while Jupiter and Saturn are classified as gas giants. Both ice giants are covered by thick gaseous atmospheres that are, however, much thinner than those possessed by the much larger giant gas duo. Also, Uranus and Neptune contain larger solid nuclei than Jupiter and Saturn, and both are smaller in size than the huge gas giants.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) detected Neptune on December 28, 1612. Galileo used his primitive “spyglass”, one of the first telescopes used for astronomical purposes, to make his discovery of the outermost giant planet known in our Solar System. He again detected Neptune for the second time on January 27, 1613. Unfortunately, on both occasions, Galileo mistook this distant world for a fixed star located near the planet Jupiter. Because of this unfortunate case of scientific mistaken identity, Galileo is not often credited with the discovery of Neptune.
From NASA Travel 2 The spaceship whizzed past the somewhat larger blue-green ice giant Uranus in 1989 sent some interesting images of Neptune to Earth that revealed a beautiful world with bands of sapphire blue. Those early images of Neptune also showed swirling, blob-like storms that were eerily similar to hurricanes on Earth. Neptune’s fringes and bands have different shades of blue and were formed as a result of atmospheric methane, not oxygen. Some of Neptune’s storms look like swirling white marshmallows.
Travel 2 it also succeeded in being the first spacecraft to detect Neptune Large dark spot in 1989. Large dark spot it was an anticyclonic storm that spanned 19,000 X 6,000 kilometers, and astronomers on Earth immediately noted the resemblance between this distant Neptunian storm and the one on Jupiter. Great Red Spot. However, several years later, on November 2, 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) did not detect the Large dark spotwhich had apparently disappeared. Instead of, HST discovered a new storm, which was very similar to the Large dark spot, in the northern hemisphere of Neptune.
Neptune itself is not visible to the unaided human eye, and it is the only planet in our Solar System that has been discovered by mathematical prediction rather than direct observation. The unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led the French astronomer Alexis Bouvard (1767-1843) to mathematically determine that the orbit of Uranus was being influenced by the gravitational pull of an unknown planet. As a result, Neptune was discovered with a telescope on September 23, 1846 by the German astronomer Johann Galle (1812-1911). Galle discovered Neptune to a degree from the position that had previously been predicted by the French mathematician and astronomer Urbain Le Verrier (1811-1877). Not long after the discovery of Neptune, its largest moon, Triton, was discovered. None of the planet’s remaining known moons were telescopically detected until the 20th century.
Neptune’s distance from our planet makes it appear small in Earth’s sky, making it difficult for astronomers to observe it with ground-based telescopes. The space telescope HST, together with large telescopes on the ground, recently provided a treasure trove of detailed observations from afar using the technique of adaptive optics. Adaptive optics is a method that corrects for distortions resulting from temperature, wind, and mechanical stress by deforming a mirror to compensate for this distortion.
Like the other gas giant planets that inhabit the outer Solar System, Neptune has many moons and a chiffon ring system. Neptune’s rings are fragmented and very faint, and are called bows. Tea bows were first discovered in 1982, and later confirmed by the Travel 2 spacecraft.
Neptune has 14 known moons. Nesus It is the farthest Neptunian moon from its parent planet, and its orbit creates a strange elliptical loop that takes it nearly 46 million miles from Neptune. Nesus it takes 27 years to complete a single orbit.
A strange heavenly waltz
Naiad Y Thalassa they are very small lunar worlds whose shape has been likened to “Tic Tacs”. Both of these small moons are only about 60 miles long. Like two of Neptune’s seven inner moons, Naiad Y Thalassa are members of a densely populated system that is intricately interspersed with the weak Bend down rings.
How come this strange duo ended up so close and so far at the same time? Astronomers propose that the original moon system was disrupted when Neptune’s powerful gravitational pull caught its large moon, Triton. As a result, the inner moons and rings were born from the heirloom remains of the rubble left over from this ancient calamity.
Triton circles Neptune in the wrong direction. This generally indicates a captured object that was not born in its current position. Triton may be an unhappy hobo of the Kuiper Belt It traveled too close to Neptune’s gravitational embrace and thus became a moon of one of the most important planets in our Solar System. Tea Kuiper Belt it is a region beyond Neptune that is home to a population of icy objects of varying sizes and is considered to be home to frozen comet nuclei. In the future, Triton’s orbit will likely deteriorate to the point where it plunges into its foster parent planet.
“We suspect that Naiad it was kicked into its tilted orbit by an earlier interaction with one of Neptune’s other inner moons. Only later, after its orbital inclination was established, could it Naiad settle into this unusual resonance with Thalassa, “ Dr. Brozovic explained on November 14, 2019. JPL press release.
Dr Brozovic and her team uncovered the strange orbital drama by analyzing observations made by HST. His work also provides the first indication of the internal composition of Neptune’s inner moons. The scientists used the observations to calculate its mass and, in this way, determine its densities, which turned out to be similar to those of water ice.
Dr. Mark Showalter, a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper, told reporters that “Naiad Y Thalassa they have probably been locked together in this configuration for a long time, because it makes their orbits more stable. They keep the peace by never getting too close. “
