Mark Showalter and his research team at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, are on a roll. They’ve shown us yet again how much we have to learn about our closest planetary neighbors.

In 2011 and 2012, Showalter’s team discovered two additional moons orbiting Pluto. (The International Astronomical Union recently decided on the names Kerberos and Styx for these moons, despite an overwhelming public vote to name one of them Vulcan.) Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the same researchers recently discovered a new moon orbiting Neptune.

“I got nice pictures of the arcs [segments of the planet’s rings], which was my main purpose, but I also got this little extra dot that I was not expecting to see,” says Showalter.

At 65,400 miles from Neptune, the speedy, newly-discovered moon completes an orbit every 23 hours. This moon is hard to track, but more than 150 archived images from Hubble between 2004 and 2009 enabled Showalter to track down the orbit of the new moon.

“The moons and arcs orbit very quickly, so we had to devise a way to follow their motion in order to bring out the details of the system,” he says. “It’s the same reason a sports photographer tracks a running athlete—the athlete stays in focus, but the background blurs.” (Showalter compares capturing the new moon to Eadweard James Muybridge’s famous racehorse photographs in a blog post earlier this week.)

This 12-mile wide moon is the smallest of the Neptunian system (which currently includes 14 moons), and revolves around Neptune between the orbits of Larissa and Proteus. For now the tiny dot is called S/2004 N 1. The official name may not be put to vote this time (but Star Trek fans can get cracking on ideas).

S/2004 N 1’s discovery brings up additional questions besides its new name. A mini moon like this should have had trouble forming in the neighborhood of much larger moons.

“How you can have a 20-kilometre object around Neptune is a little bit of a puzzle,” says Showalter. “It’s far enough away that its orbit is stable. Once you put it there it will stay there. The question is, how did it get there?”

Triton is Neptune’s biggest moon, orbiting in the direction opposite Neptune’s spin. Astronomers originally thought that a moon of this type would have to be captured by Neptune’s gravity, destroying all smaller moons in the process.

Stay tuned to learn S/2004 N 1’s new name, and perhaps new theories about how it originated in the first place!

Alyssa Keimach is an astronomy and astrophysics student at the University of Michigan and interns for the Morrison Planetarium.

Image: NASA, ESA, M. Showalter

A new analysis of data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft reveals that beneath the surface of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io is an “ocean” of molten or partially molten magma. The magma ocean layer appears to be more than 30 miles thick, making up at least 10 percent of the moon’s mantle by volume. The blistering temperature of the magma ocean probably exceeds 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Celsius). Hotcha!

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft discovered Io’s volcanoes in 1979 and they are the only known active magma volcanoes in the solar system other than those on Earth. The energy for the volcanic activity comes from the squeezing and stretching of the moon by Jupiter’s gravity as Io orbits the immense planet, the largest in the solar system.

Even though the magnetic-field data was taken from Galileo fly-bys of Io in October 1999 and February 2000, it took awhile to detect this magma layer. ScienceInsider reports that

high-flying volcanic debris frustrated space physicists’ attempts to use Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field as a probe of Io’s interior.

The current analysis, over ten years in the making, was published in this week’s edition of Science.

From a hot ocean to hot Jupiters…  Hot Jupiters describe large gaseous exoplanets that orbit very close to their parent star. Some of these hot Jupiters are just plain crazy weird, say scientists, because they orbit their star in the opposite direction.

“That’s really weird, and it’s even weirder because the planet is so close to the star,” said Frederic A. Rasio, a theoretical astrophysicist at Northwestern University. “How can one be spinning one way and the other orbiting exactly the other way? It’s crazy. It so obviously violates our most basic picture of planet and star formation.”

When scientists find something weird and crazy, they investigate. And that’s just what Rasio and his colleagues did. Using large-scale computer simulations, they are the first to model how a hot Jupiter’s orbit can flip and go in the direction opposite to the star’s spin. Gravitational perturbations by a much more distant planet result in the hot Jupiter having both a “wrong way” and a very close orbit, according to their research, published this week in Nature.

In other exoplanet news… The Kepler mission’s primary goal is to find Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, and now you can help find them, too! UC Berkeley astronomers aimed a radio telescope in the direction of Kepler’s most Earth-like candidates last weekend. Once they acquire data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers. Join SETI@home or learn more information about the project here.

Io image: NASA/JPL/University of Michigan/UCLA

The scientists used data from NASA’s Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions (dating from 1996 to 2009) to search the ring systems of Jupiter and Saturn for patterns of cometary disruptions.

In the case of Jupiter, the ripple-producing culprit was the well-known comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, whose debris cloud hurtled through the thin Jupiter ring system during a kamikaze course into the planet in July 1994. Scientists attribute Saturn’s ripples to a similar object—likely another cloud of comet debris—plunging through the inner rings in the second half of 1983. The researchers believe this comet passed through when Saturn was on the other side of the Sun from Earth.

“We now know that collisions into the rings are very common—a few times per decade for Jupiter and a few times per century for Saturn,” said Mark Showalter of SETI and lead author of the paper on Jupiter. “Now scientists know that the rings record these impacts like grooves in a vinyl record, and we can play back their history later.”

The tightness of the rings’ “grooves” gives clues to when the comet debris came hurling through, according to Nature News:

As time passed, this tilt has become a progressively tighter spiral, meaning that the shorter the ripple’s wavelength, the longer ago it was formed.

(Discover has a great NASA video of the rings becoming tighter with age on their site.)

The ripples also give scientists a measurement of the size of the clouds of cometary debris that hit the rings. In each of these cases, the nuclei of the comets were a few kilometers wide before they likely broke apart.

“Finding these fingerprints still in the rings is amazing and helps us better understand impact processes in our solar system,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “Cassini’s long sojourn around Saturn has helped us tease out subtle clues that tell us about the history of our origins.”

“What’s cool is we’re finding evidence that a planet’s rings can be affected by specific, traceable events that happened in the last 30 years, rather than a hundred million years ago,” said Matthew Hedman, of Cornell and lead author of the Saturn paper. “The solar system is a much more dynamic place than we gave it credit for.”

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI

Actually it was SETIcon that took place this past weekend, with sessions that covered everything from extraterrestrial life and how to find it, to asteroid hunting, multiverses and Pluto politics.

It was a mixture of fun (“Is Doomsday 2012 For Real or Will you Still Have to Pay Taxes in 2013?”) and hard science (Secrets of the Red Planet: What Have We Learned from Mars Exploration? “) that played well to the attendees. From the Mercury News:

SETI is a highly technical and technological scientific effort involving satellites, high-level computer analysis and some of the finest astronomical minds in the world.

On the other hand, most regular folks are far more interested in “Battlestar Galactica” and “Star Trek.” SETI folks understand this and say the conference is part of their effort to teach science, raise money and generate public interest in their quest.

The crowd of teachers, scientists and fans of the SETI Institute were able to mingle with their rock stars—Frank Drake (the founder of SETI), Jill Tarter, and Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, among others. And there were real rock stars (and even TV stars), too.

It was Frank Drake who created the Drake Equation that estimates the potential number of technological (or intelligent) civilizations that may exist. According to NOVA:

There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each bearing hundreds of billions of stars and perhaps billions of planets, so even if intelligent life is rare, we can’t be completely alone, the argument often goes.

The Drake Equation, named after its creator, radio astronomer Frank Drake, is an attempt to frame the question scientifically by assigning a value to all the relevant terms, from the number of stars born each year in our galaxy to the number of stars with planets, and so on.

Or as Shostak said in the riveting and fun “Bad Astronomy: Astrology, UFOs, the Face on Mars, and More” session, basically the equation helps formulate the rate at which civilizations are born and how long they’ll stay around, suggesting the chances that contact with them is possible.

And that’s what gives Shostak his confidence in the communication with ET. But given the distances and time it takes for a message to travel, he believes it will only be a one-way conversation. Look for more information tomorrow as our SETIcon coverage continues with “ET—What and How”.

Though it has benefited greatly from the power of online connectivity, citizen science is not a new concept, it’s not all astronomical in nature, and it doesn’t necessarily require a computer.

The oldest citizen science project is the Christmas Bird Count, a census of birds of the Western Hemisphere that was started by the Audubon Society in 1900.  One of the newest is the campaign to monitor the eclipsing binary star system Epsilon Aurigae, where every 27 years one component of the star system blocks the other from view for about 2 years.

In 2007, the Citizen Science Alliance launched an online project called Galaxy Zoo, inviting guests to log in and classify distant galaxies by their shapes—spiral, barred spiral, edge-on, or irregular.  An instant hit, Galaxy Zoo became enormously popular and opened the door for additional projects that included observations of merging galaxies, searches for solar flares and supernovae, and, most recently, classification of features on the Moon, all under the broad project name “Zooniverse”.

Zooniverse follows in the footsteps of one of the best-known online popular science projects, SETI@home, based at the University of California’s Space Sciences Lab and which was launched in 1999.  A more passive approach, SETI@home uses the idle-time on subscribers’ computers to activate a screensaver that doubles as a signal analyzer. The analyzer searches downloaded packages of signal data detected by radio telescopes for patterns that might indicate intelligent activity.

Citizen scientists have much to offer to real science. It was almost a year ago that amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley discovered a new spot on Jupiter that had scientists pointing their telescopes in a new direction. Today, Hubble announced the cause of the spot: an asteroid.