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Pluto's origin and identity had long puzzled astronomers. One early hypothesis was that Pluto was an escaped moon of Neptune [161] knocked out of orbit by Neptune's largest moon, Triton. This idea was eventually rejected after dynamical studies showed it to be impossible because Pluto never approaches Neptune in its orbit. [162]
Neptune's innermost moon, Naiad, is in a 73:69 fourth-order resonance with the next outward moon, Thalassa. As it orbits Neptune, the more inclined Naiad successively passes Thalassa twice from above and then twice from below, in a cycle that repeats every ~21.5 Earth days. The two moons are about 3540 km apart when they pass each other.
The motions of Orcus (in grey) and Pluto (in red) in a rotating frame with a period equal to Neptune's orbital period (holding Neptune stationary) Pluto and its moons (top) compared in size, albedo and colour with Orcus, 2003 AZ 84, and Ixion. The 2:3 resonance at 39.4 AU is by far the dominant category among the resonant objects.
Thus the orbital period in low orbit depends only on the density of the central body, regardless of its size. So, for the Earth as the central body (or any other spherically symmetric body with the same mean density, about 5,515 kg/m 3, [2] e.g. Mercury with 5,427 kg/m 3 and Venus with 5,243 kg/m 3) we get: T = 1.41 hours
A total of five planets are going retrograde between May and September: Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. "Retrograde" is a term used to describe when a planet's orbit appears to slow.
In the case of Pluto, the known accidental quasi-satellite, 15810 Arawn, is, like Pluto, a plutino, and is forced into this configuration by the gravitational influence of Neptune. [15] This dynamical behavior is recurrent where Arawn becomes a quasi-satellite of Pluto every 2.4 Myr and remains in that configuration for nearly 350,000 years.
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 ...
The orbits are ellipses, with foci F 1 and F 2 for Planet 1, and F 1 and F 3 for Planet 2. The Sun is at F 1.; The shaded areas A 1 and A 2 are equal, and are swept out in equal times by Planet 1's orbit.