An astronomer studying images of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope found a 14th moon orbiting the planet according to NASA.
The new moon is estimated to be around 12 miles in diameter and is located approximately 65,400 miles from Neptune according to Reuters.
Astronomer Mark Showalter from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, was searching through Hubble images for moons inside faint ring fragments around Neptune when he decided to run his analysis program into a larger part of the sky.
"We had been processing the data for quite some time and it was on a whim that I said, 'OK, let's just look out further," Showalter said to Reuters.
"I changed my program so that instead of stopping just outside the ring system it processed the data all the way out, walked away from my computer and waited an hour while it did all the processing for me. When I came back, I looked at the image and there was this extra dot that wasn't supposed to be there," Showalter said.
Follow-up analysis of different archived Hubble images of Neptune determined that the object was in fact a moon.
Showalter and his co-workers are currently thinking of a good name to propose to the International Astronomical Union according to Reuters.
"We haven't really gotten far with that. What I can say is that the name will be out of Roman and Greek mythology and it will have to do with characters who are related to Neptune, the god of the oceans," Showalter said.
Neptune's largest moon, Triton, was discovered in 1846, just days after Neptune was discovered.
The new moon I located between Larissa and Proteus and orbits Neptune in approximately 23 hours.
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