Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
In 1978, the discovery of Pluto's moon Charon allowed the measurement of Pluto's mass for the first time: roughly 0.2% that of Earth, and far too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.
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 ...
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 ...
Several of these were once in equilibrium but are no longer: these include Earth's moon [77] and all of the moons listed for Saturn apart from Titan and Rhea. [55] The status of Callisto, Titan, and Rhea is uncertain, as is that of the moons of Uranus, Pluto [25] and Eris. [51]
The nearly circular and coplanar orbits of Pluto's moons suggest that they may have gone through tidal evolutions since their formation. [33] [28] At the time of the formation of Pluto's smaller moons, Hydra may have had a more eccentric orbit around the Pluto-Charon barycenter. [29]
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 tidal locking, as compared to that of the Earth and the Moon, where the Moon always shows the same face to Earth, but not vice versa.
The varying gravitational influences of Pluto and Charon as they orbit their barycenter causes the chaotic tumbling of Pluto's small moons, including Kerberos. [21] At the time of the New Horizons flyby, the rotational period of Kerberos was about 5.33 days and its rotational axis was tilted about 96 degrees to its orbit.