What if I told you a guy who made beer for a living discovered one of the weirdest moons in space?

The Day Neptune Got Its Very Own Moon!

How a scientist discovered a giant moon hiding in plain sight

A beer-brewing astronomer found Neptune's giant backward-orbiting moon Triton!

On September 25, 1846, just seventeen days after Neptune was discovered, astronomer William Lassell spotted something amazing — Neptune had a moon!

Lassell was a beer brewer from England who LOVED space. He used money from his brewery to build his own giant telescope! When he heard about Neptune's discovery, he immediately pointed his telescope at the new planet.

And WOW, what a find! The moon he discovered was later named Triton, after the Greek god of the sea (Neptune was the Roman sea god, so it made perfect sense!). Triton turned out to be absolutely HUGE — about 1,680 miles wide. That's almost as wide as the distance from New York to Denver!

But here's the really weird part: Triton orbits Neptune BACKWARDS! It's one of the only large moons in our entire solar system that does this. Scientists think Triton might have been a wandering space rock that Neptune captured with its gravity, like catching a baseball in a mitt!

💡 Triton is so cold that if you brought a banana there, you could use it as a hammer because it would freeze solid instantly!