Triton

Source: NASA

TRITON! Out of all of Neptune’s 14 moons, this one is a showstopper.

The largest of all its fellow satellites, Triton is truly a sight for sore eyes. With a surface that could debatably be mistaken for a cantaloupe (yes, cantaloupe), this moon is essentially a fruity snowball. It spews snow (a different kind of snow than us Earthlings are accommodated to) into space by means of volcanoes… so ice volcanoes. As if that wasn’t enough to blow your mind, Triton has a thin atmosphere, a retrograde orbit (meaning it orbits Uranus in a direction opposite to its rotation), a temperature that deems it one of the coldest objects in our solar system and a fate that is slightly unsettling… Turns out, Neptune’s gravity is so intense that it is slowly but surely pulling Triton closer and closer. Eventually, we speculate that Triton will get so close to Neptune that it will collapse and add an additional ring to the planet. It’s amazing because as far away as Triton is from our Sun (averaging about 2.8 billion miles), it is still a geologically active body like Io of Jupiter and Enceladus of Saturn. So here we are on planet Earth, minding our own business, while there are bodies millions and billions of miles away just spitting stuff into space. Think about that. “And I think to myself, what a wonderful *universe.*”