New Study Reveals Nereid's Origins, Unlocking Neptune's Evolutionary Secrets

At the cold frontier of our solar system, a moon long dismissed as an oddity has become a key to understanding the solar system's most turbulent chapter. For seventy years, astronomers debated whether Neptune's moon Nereid was born in place or captured from afar — a question that new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and fresh computer simulations now answer with quiet confidence. Nereid's chemical resemblance to the moons of Uranus, combined with models showing how Triton's violent arrival could have flung native moons into wild orbits, suggests that Nereid is not a wanderer at