The gas giants of our solar system appear to have the specific gift of augmenting or capturing large numbers of moons of various sizes and characteristics. Coincidentally, moons that are much more interesting than our own, having extremely interesting characteristics, such as atmospheres, constant volcanic resurfacing, and a host of others, are extremely distant and difficult to observe. One particularly intriguing moon orbiting the farthest gas giant, Neptune, has been given the name Triton. Because Triton has primarily been observed during flybys, astronomers must rely on observations using reflected light, imaging, and infrared observations to help make inferences about what the moon actually looks like. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To get an idea of ​​what Triton might actually be like, a good place to start is by discussing where it came from. Triton is the largest moon orbiting Neptune and makes up approximately 99.5% of the mass of all Neptune's satellites (1). Since most others have diameters ranging from 5 to 200 km, one has the right to be curious as to where this relatively massive moon, with a diameter of 2700 kilometers (2), came from. Since Triton has a very similar composition and size to the dwarf planet Pluto, most astronomers attribute it to the same origin in the Kuiper belt (2). If the two bodies have a similar origin, it would not be out of the question to consider them to be relatively of the same composition as most things in the Kuiper Belt, being mostly frozen gas and ice. The Kuiper Belt lies beyond the orbit of Neptune, extending from 35 to about 50 AU (3). Some short-period comets originate from here, with orbits of about 200 years, while most other comets originate in the Oort cloud (which extends up to about 50,000 AU) (3). The Kuiper Belt is home to many dwarf planets the size of our Moon, whose composition is mostly frozen gas and ice. Due to the extreme cold, ice in the Kuiper Belt behaves very similarly to rocks and may have similar properties as such. Shown in the diagram on the right (4), Neptune's orbit lies just inside the Kuiper Belt. This would lead astronomers to believe that Triton may very well have been picked up by Neptune during a close encounter. Triton's retrograde orbit also proves to be a telltale sign of this event(5,6). Triton's size can also provide some information about what surface temperatures might be, whether or not it has a magnetic field, and even whether it might hold an atmosphere. There is definitely some sort of seismic activity going on within Triton, as seen in its spectacular geysers and cryovolcanism (1). Cryovolcanism hurling water and methane into space is a clear indicator of a relatively warm interior. It's not entirely clear whether the interior is churned by Neptune's gravity or collisions, but more support is placed in the categories of "tidal dissipation, heat transfer, and tectonics." (7). The stirring of a hot interior is certainly cause for speculation about the possibility of a magnetic field, which could lead to the possibility of an atmosphere. Luckily, astronomers were able to highlight the presence of clouds in a photo taken by the Voyager 2 satellite during a flyby (8). These clouds that appeared just above the southern cap certainly indicate the presence of an atmosphere with a density equal to 1/70,000 of.