Pluto may have been demoted, but its family is getting bigger and bigger. Now, two of the dwarf planet’s tiniest moons need names — but rather than leaving the Plutonian satellites’ naming ceremony to astronomers, that honor has fallen to you.
The Plutonian system detailing the orbits of Charon, Nix, Hydra, “P4″ and “P5.” Image credit: NASA
The discoverers of … Read the rest of this article
A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered another moon orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto.
They say the new moon, Pluto’s 5th, is likely irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. Provisionally designated S/2012 (134340) 1, it was detected in nine separate sets of images taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on June 26, … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s New Horizons mission reached a special milestone yesterday, Dec. 2, 2011, on its way to reconnoiter the Pluto system, coming closer to Pluto than any other spacecraft.
It’s taken New Horizons 2,143 days of high-speed flight – covering more than a million kilometers per day for nearly six years—to break the closest-approach mark of 1.58 billion kilometers set by … Read the rest of this article
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new moon circling Pluto. P4, as it is currently called, is the smallest moon yet found orbiting Pluto, with an estimated size of 13–34 km. By comparison, Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, is 1043 km across, while Nix and Hydra are 32–113 km wide. The tiny, new satellite popped up in a Hubble … Read the rest of this article
Lonely Pluto floats in the darkness at the edge of our solar system. It’s so far away even the Hubble Space Telescope has trouble making out the details. Nevertheless, Pluto is so interesting, even fuzzy images of the dwarf planet are compelling.
A team of researchers led by Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute recently released the best Hubble … Read the rest of this article
Pluto is the second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System (after Eris) and the tenth-largest body observed directly orbiting the Sun. Originally classified as a planet, Pluto is now considered the largest member of a distinct region called the Kuiper belt.
In Roman mythology, Pluto (Greek: Hades) is the god of the underworld. The planet received this name (after … Read the rest of this article
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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