A Search for Small Distant Moons of Neptune

Details A Search for Small Distant Moons of Neptune A Search for Small Distant Moons of Neptune

Aug 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002noao.prop..221h&link_type=abstract

NOAO Proposal ID #2002B-0221

Physics

Scientific paper

With many new jovian, saturnian, and uranian irregular satellites having been discovered in the last few years, our attention naturally falls upon Neptune. In 1999, we conducted a search for neptunian satellites covering about 8 square degrees (almost the entire stable region around the planet). This survey yielded no new satellites down to R magnitude 24. We interpreted this as supporting a violent destruction of the Neptunian outer satellite system as Triton was captured. However, there were good reasons to believe that the largest un-discovered Neptune satellites lay just beyond the previous survey's magnitude limit. In August 2001, we used the mosaic camera on the Blanco 4-m to push down to m_R~eq25.5, to test this hypothesis. We discovered two neptunian satellites candidates. Using the time available after Neptune had set, we also discovered four faint uranian satellite candidates. However, poor weather at Palomar and Magellan in September 2001 and instrumental problems on the VLT in November 2001 prevented the tracking these candidates to conclusively prove that they are moons. We request time to repeat last summer's search and "re- discover" these moons, armed with the knowledge that they are there as well as having assured access to large-aperture southern hemisphere tracking time (on VLT and Magellan).

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