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NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto
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)."
Four moons means it gets to be called a planet.
Depending on how you count, it may be more accurate to say "rocky ice". By volume, Pluto has more ice than rock. (By mass, it is indeed an icy rock.)
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy rocky thing we call Pluto.
There... FTFY :D
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Hubble will eventually degrade in performance just as it has in the past. Gyros and batteries wear out, electronics get glitchy, etc.
Unfortunately, when it starts to happen again, there won't be anything we can do about it. Without the shuttle, another service mission is impossible. And with Hubble's successor (JWST) hanging by a fraying budgetary thread, there likely will be no replacing it with an improved telescope, either.
We as a country have given up on science, unless it makes immediate profits for megacorporations or helps the military kill people more efficiently in foreign lands.
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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.
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
Unfortunately, when it starts to happen again, there won't be anything we can do about it. Without the shuttle, another service mission is impossible. And with Hubble's successor (JWST) hanging by a fraying budgetary thread, there likely will be no replacing it with an improved telescope, either.
This has been repeated a number of times, but launching an entirely new Hubble into high orbit (without a shuttle, that is) would be substantially cheaper than maintaining the shuttle program in order to service the existing scope. I hope JWST pulls through, but I don't think NASA should get a blank check from the taxpayers.
We as a country have given up on science, unless it makes immediate profits for megacorporations or helps the military kill people more efficiently in foreign lands.
I'm not a fan of our budget priorities for the last decade, but I can understand why Congress is viewing JWST skeptically. The telescope isn't even supposed to launch until 2017 at the earliest and it's already billions of dollars over budget. Sure, this is a fraction of what we're flushing down the toilet in futile wars, but we're already stuck in those, and they're much more difficult to pull out of than a project that's still in the planning stages.
Except for servicing Hubble - a dubious justification - the shuttle was a terribly inefficient use of money for the science that came out of the program. As far as scientific funding in general is concerned, NASA continues to do great work with remote probes and will be sending another rover to Mars soon. The NIH and NSF managed to avoid major funding cuts in a year when most federal agencies got hit hard, and the DOE Office of Science, which was slated for a huge cut, also survived mostly intact. Speaking as a scientist involved with many of these agencies, I'm thrilled with the outcome.
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.
Absolutely! Further more its physical and orbital characteristics clearly associate it with the recently discovered Kuiper Belt Objects. It is should not be viewed as a "pathetic little planet wannabe" but as the King of the KBOs (Eris would be the Queen).
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I thought there'd be more Mass Effect jokes. Jeeze, people, it's 2011, get over Star Wars!
Yep. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that our star holds on to more than nine planets. I also think the idea that Pluto isn't a planet is ridiculous, and that any definition that ends up that way is by definition, busted.
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