S21B0131
S21B0131
It is much harder to discover moons around Neptune compared to the other giant planets because of its extreme distance. Neptune is the only giant planet that has not had its entire Hill Sphere searched for moons using modern CCDs on a large telescope. Neptune has only 7 known outer moons. Neptune’s outer moon system is interesting since the extremely inclined large moon Triton might be a captured Kuiper Belt object that disrupted the original primordial moon system and scattered outwards the highly eccentric moon Nereid. To better constrain the origin of Triton and the other outer moons, further disrupted or captured moons of Neptune must be discovered. Also, the discovery of smaller moons would shed light on the poorly understood collisional evolution of the system. We propose to use HSC to search the majority of Neptune’s stable Hill Sphere and go some two magnitudes fainter than any previous survey to find smaller moons. This will allow us to compare Neptune’s moon system to the other giant planets to constrain the formation and evolution of the planets and their moons. We expect to find several new Neptune moons.
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