- A team of scientists from NASA’s Ames Research Center, from the SETI Institute, and from the University of California have discovered a new moon of Neptune in archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope.
- Researcher Showalter has named the seventh inner moon as Hippocamp, which is named for the sea monster from Greek mythology.
- Originally designated as S/2004 N 1 and Neptune XIV, this moon was found in images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2004–05 and 2009, and then confirmed in further images captured in 2016.
- Hippocamp is only 34 kilometres wide, which makes it diminutive compared with its larger siblings, and it orbits just 12,000 km inside the orbit of Proteus, the planet’s largest inner moon and the planet’s second largest moon .
- By agreement, Neptune’s moons are all named after Greek and Roman water gods, or beings and minor deities associated with water gods. It makes sense, because Neptune was God of the Sea.
