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Pluto's four small circumbinary moons orbit Pluto at two to four times the distance of Charon, ranging from Styx at 42,700 kilometres to Hydra at 64,800 kilometres from the barycenter of the system. They have nearly circular prograde orbits in the same orbital plane as Charon. All are much smaller than Charon.
Pluto has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometres; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its orbital distance of 39.5 AU (5.91 billion km; 3.67 billion mi).
Charon is a relatively large moon in comparison to its primary and also has a very close orbit. This results in Pluto and Charon being mutually tidally locked. Pluto's other moons are not tidally locked; Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra all rotate chaotically due to the influence of Charon. [17] Similarly, Eris and Dysnomia are mutually tidally ...
Charon and Earth’s moon are both a large fraction of the size of the main body they orbit, which is unlike other smaller moons orbiting planets throughout our solar system. (Pluto has four ...
One of its most important discoveries is that Pluto has been geologically active for 4 billion years. ... scientists have enough material to publish five new papers that detail the probe's ...
NASA launched the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 to learn more about the icy dwarf planet Pluto. Here are some of the first photos from that mission, taken from between 125 and 115 million miles away.
A simulated view of the Pluto–Charon system showing that Pluto orbits a point outside itself. Also visible is the mutual tidal locking between the two bodies. Charon and Pluto orbit each other every 6.387 days. The two objects are gravitationally locked to one another, so each keeps the same face towards the other. This is a case of mutual ...
Pluto's four other moons, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx are far smaller and orbit the Pluto–Charon system. [5] Among the other dwarf planets, Ceres has no known moons. It is 90 percent certain that Ceres has no moons larger than 1 km in size, assuming that they would have the same albedo as Ceres itself. [6] Eris has one large known moon ...