Neptune's Moon Nereid Likely Original Survivor of Cosmic Collision

At the cold frontier of our solar system, a small moon named Nereid has carried a billion-year-old secret that science is only now beginning to decipher. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers have found that Nereid's ice-rich composition marks it not as a wanderer captured from the outer dark, but as a native companion of Neptune itself — the sole survivor of an ancient catastrophe that destroyed an entire family of worlds. Its strange, elongated orbit, long seen as a curiosity, may in fact be the scar of survival, the path a moon carved for itself to escape the violence that consu