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The innermost and largest moon, Charon, was discovered by James Christy on 22 June 1978, nearly half a century after Pluto was discovered. This led to a substantial revision in estimates of Pluto's size, which had previously assumed that the observed mass and reflected light of the system were all attributable to Pluto alone.
Nix is a natural satellite of Pluto, with a diameter of 49.8 km (30.9 mi) across its longest dimension. [3] It was discovered along with Pluto's outermost moon Hydra on 15 May 2005 by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, [1] and was named after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night. [10]
Charon (/ ˈ k ɛər ɒ n,-ə n / KAIR-on, -ən or / ˈ ʃ ær ə n / SHARR-ən), [note 1] or (134340) Pluto I, is the largest of the five known natural satellites of the dwarf planet Pluto. It has a mean radius of 606 km (377 mi). Charon is the sixth-largest known trans-Neptunian object after Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Gonggong. [19]
It is about half the diameter and an eighth the mass of Pluto, a dwarf planet that resides in a frigid region of the outer Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, beyond the most distant planet Neptune.
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.
The New Horizons was the first mission to the planet Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. ... The 1,477-mile wide world had a 751-mile wide moon—the largest moon relative to the size of its parent body in ...
Plot of the known Kuiper belt objects, set against the four giant planets. Pluto's origin and identity had long puzzled astronomers. One early hypothesis was that Pluto was an escaped moon of Neptune [164] knocked out of orbit by Neptune's largest moon, Triton. This idea was eventually rejected after dynamical studies showed it to be impossible ...
Scientists have discovered carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide on the surface of Charon, Pluto's largest moon, offering clues about the origins of the space rock and other celestial objects in ...