MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — Neptune's official moon count is now up to 14, after a team of astronomers used NASA's Hubble Space telescope to shed some much needed light on the mini satellite.<br /><br />According to a press release from the SETI Institute, a tiny moon discovered orbiting Neptune in 2013 has now been named Hippocamp. It is one of the planet's seven inner moons, and the newest of its 14 known moons.<br /><br />Naming conventions for the Neptune system require something out of Greco-Roman undersea mythology. In Greek mythology, Hippocamp is a half fish, half horse creature. <br /><br />It's related to Hippocampus, which is the scientific name for the seahorse, and the name of a major component of the human brain that's seahorse-shaped.<br /><br />Hippocamp measures about 34 kilometers across, and is 1/1000th the mass of Proteus, which at 418 kilometers across is Neptune's largest inner satellite.<br /><br />The small moon was observed to be orbiting unusually close to Proteus, even though such a large moon should have gravitationally swept it aside and cleared its orbital path.<br /><br />In a paper published in the journal Nature, SETI researchers hypothesized that Hippocamp is a fragment of Proteus that broke off following a collision with a comet billions of years ago.
