The discovery of another moon around Pluto is exciting news for planetary science, but it's also likely causing some anxiety for the team in charge of New Horizons, a spacecraft set to be the first ...

Pluto and Charon don’t behave like a typical planet and moon system. Instead of Charon orbiting inside Pluto’s body, both objects orbit a point in space between them called the barycenter. That’s why ...

Recent scientific modeling has proposed a fascinating theory about how Pluto captured its largest moon, Charon. The theory suggests a novel “kiss and capture” event, where the two celestial bodies ...

Finally, a family portrait of Pluto is beginning to emerge! For the first time ever, astronomers have captured two never-before-photographed moons orbiting Pluto. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft ...

Sure, Pluto received a bit of a demotion when its status as a planet was called into question a few years ago, but that doesn’t mean it stopped giving scientists reasons to study it. And thanks to a ...

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Back in the 1980’s, a now-defunct magazine called Science Digest held a contest to name Planet X — the still-undiscovered world that astronomers believed might lie out beyond Pluto. One of the best ...

Pluto, once considered the ninth planet, was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 because it shares its orbital path with other objects. Despite its demotion, this distant world continues to ...