NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday July 20, 2011 @04:32AM from the spinning-round-and-round dept.

thebchuckster writes "Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 — was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet. The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km)."

2 of 208 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Planet by Canazza · 2011-07-20 05:04 · Score: 5, Informative

Pluto and Charon orbit around a non-fixed barycenter that is actually outside of both Pluto and Charon. Pluto/Charon is really a binary Dwarf Planet with 3 moons. Which, honestly, is fucking awesome.

--
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Re:Planet by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · 2011-07-20 05:08 · Score: 3, Informative

The BBC has a write up that says the other 2 moons were discovered using the Hubble in 2005 at the beginning of the 6th paragraph.

--
Time to offend someone