Hubble Space Telescope helps find evidence that Neptune's largest moon is warming up

Observations obtained by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based instruments reveal that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, seems to have heated up significantly since the Voyager spacecraft visited it in 1989.

'Since 1989, at least, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming  percentage-wise, its a very large increase, ' said James L. Elliot, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. The warming trend is causing part of Tritons frozen nitrogen surface to turn into gas, thus making its thin atmosphere denser. Dr. Elliot and his colleagues from MIT, Lowell Observatory, and Williams College published their findings in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature.