![]() ![]() When you rank all the moons, small planets, and dwarf planets in our Solar System, you can see that. That’s a big, red flag that tells us Triton did not form from the same circumplanetary disk that the interior moons (or the moons of the other gas giants) formed from. ![]() ![]() It’s tilted at about 23° with respect to the plane that Neptune rotates on its axis, in addition to revolving in the wrong direction. Additionally, Triton isn’t even in the same plane - or close to it - that Neptune orbits. Triton orbits in what we call the retrograde direction: it orbits clockwise around Neptune, even as Neptune and all the other planets (as well as all of the moons interior to Triton) revolve in the opposite (prograde) direction. Moreover, they all orbit in the same direction that the planets do: counterclockwise, if you’re looking “down” from the north pole of the Sun. Every other large moon that we know of - Earth’s Moon, as well as all of the major, massive moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus - all orbit in roughly the same plane as the planet they orbit. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER ZYJACKLIN NASA / JPL / USGSįor starters, Triton’s orbit is all wrong. Triton's orientation is the strongest evidence that it is a captured body. rotation (green), and a tilt of 130° to objects that co-rotate with the ecliptic plane. The orbit of Triton (red) has a 157° tilt in comparison to moons that co-rotate with Neptune's. Interior to Neptune, the rest of its satellites look normal: there are seven of them, and while the innermost Naiad is inclined at 4.7° with respect to Neptune’s rotation, the other six are tilted by less than 1°.īut when you look at Triton and beyond, it doesn’t look like any of the other known lunar systems. Neptune’s satellites are dominated by one massive moon: Triton, which currently ranks as the seventh largest moon in the Solar System (behind the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, Saturn’s Titan, and Earth’s Moon). Beyond Oberon, there are nine known small moons thus far, with the closest one about seven times as distant from Uranus as Oberon is.īut then, we come to Neptune. Interior to Oberon, there are a total of 17 Uranian moons, and only Miranda, whose orbit is tilted by 4.2° with respect to Uranus’s rotation, is tilted by more than 1°. The next planet out, Uranus, has five major, massive moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. Note that all of Saturn's major moons out to Iapetus all orbit in the same plane, indicating their formation from a circumplanetary disk. The entirety of Saturn's main rings, from the inner D ring to the outer F ring, may be much newer. ![]()
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