Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Neptune’s Weirdest Moon Nereid Might Be the Lone Survivor of an Ancient "Moonpocalypse"

Our best ever image of Nereid, taken by the Voyager 2 probe in 1989. Credit - NASA/JPL

Neptune is definitely the odd one out of the gas giants. It’s tilted at a strange angle, and its moons are completely different from any other gas giant we know of. A new paper, published in Science Advances from researchers at CalTech, posits that might be because Triton, by far Neptune’s largest moon, absolutely obliterated the regular moon system it previously had, except for one particular exception - Nereid.



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