On July 14, 2015, a spacecraft flew by Pluto for the first time! NASA's New Horizons spacecraft spent 9.5 years making the ...

It took over nine years for New Horizons to reach Pluto after blasting off atop an Atlas 5 rocket on Jan. 19, 2006. After ...

What processes during the formation of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, potentially led to it having cryovolcanism, and even an internal ocean? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and ...

Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.

As the gatekeepers to the Kuiper Belt, Charon and Pluto are a unique double dwarf planet system. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

Pluto may have got romantic to capture its largest moon, colliding and engaging in a passionate but icy 10 hour kiss with Charon billions of years ago.

Pluto and its largest moon Charon could have come together via a 10-hour “kiss-and-capture” encounter after a grazing collision. Skip to main content. Scientific American. January 8, 2025.

Charon also has an abnormally circular orbit of Pluto, with its orbital eccentricity (a value between 0 and 1, where 0 is a perfect circle and 1 is an open-ended parabola) only being about 0.000161.

If Charon hit Pluto at a relatively sedate speed of about 2,000 miles per hour — 10 times as slow as the Earth’s moon-forming impact — the two would have remained in contact for about 10 ...

At half Pluto’s size and 12 percent of its mass, Charon is an unusually large moon. Since the 1990s, planetary scientists have thought that Charon could have formed in a similar way to Earth’s ...

Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.

Pluto may have got romantic to capture its largest moon, colliding and engaging in a passionate but icy 10 hour kiss with Charon billions of years ago. When you purchase through links on our site ...