Half of the moon will be illuminated as it reaches its first quarter phase on Monday, June 2. The first quarter phase marks ...

While on Titan, Dragonfly will utilize its rotorcraft design to fly around the methane-filled world and explore Titan’s chemistry and how life may have begun on Earth. Using a suite of four ...

For the first time in history, we now have real, high-resolution images of Neptune that go beyond artist impressions and ...

Explore NASA's cancelled Europa mission and learn why Europa is a key target in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Triton is the largest moon of Neptune - but it’s unlike any other. Scientists believe it was once a free-floating planet before Neptune’s gravity captured it. Its retrograde orbit, icy surface ...

Moons can also be captured: Mars’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos were probably captured from the asteroid belt and Neptune’s large moon Triton was captured from ... planetary body that shares the same ...

Triton, like our moon, orbits its planet at an unusual angle, hinting that it was once part of a binary pulled into Neptune’s orbit from the Kuiper Belt. Mathematically speaking, capturing the moon is ...

NARRATOR: During all the commotion, Triton became trapped by Neptune's gravity, slipping into its backward orbit. And being this close to a giant has consequences. Just as our moon raises tides on ...

Long ago, as it sank from a higher orbit, Triton passed close to Nereid. The smaller moon, buffeted by Triton’s more powerful gravity, may have been hurled into the elliptical orbit it now follows.

For example, a moon that forms from a planetary collision ... The reigning hypothesis in the field is that Triton was pulled into orbit from the Kuiper Belt, where one of every 10 objects is thought ...

The captured moon then settled into the orbit we observe today. This process isn’t unheard of in the solar system. Williams pointed to Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, as evidence of a similar event.

“Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde orbit ... The problem is that the ‘capture’ orbit — the one the Moon follows — began as an elongated ellipse, rather than a circle. Over time, influenced by ...