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Plot of the known Kuiper belt objects, set against the four giant planets. 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 ...
Moons of Pluto. The dwarf planet Pluto has five natural satellites. [ 1] In order of distance from Pluto, they are Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. [ 2] Charon, the largest, is mutually tidally locked with Pluto, and is massive enough that Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary dwarf planet.
Nix is a natural satellite of Pluto, with a diameter of 49.8 km (30.9 mi) across its longest dimension. [ 3] It was discovered along with Pluto's outermost moon Hydra on 15 May 2005 by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, [ 1] and was named after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night. [ 10] Nix is the third moon of Pluto by distance ...
This new view of Pluto's crescent stunningly highlights the dwarf planet's varied terrains, extended atmosphere and familiar Arctic look. NASA releases stunning new 'Earth-like' images of Pluto ...
Charon (/ ˈ k ɛər ɒ n,-ə n / KAIR-on, -ən or / ˈ ʃ ær ə n / SHAIR-ən), [note 1] or (134340) Pluto I, is the largest of the five known natural satellites of the dwarf planet Pluto. It has a mean radius of 606 km (377 mi). Charon is the sixth-largest known trans-Neptunian object after Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Gonggong. [18]
Hydra orbits the Pluto-Charon barycenter at a distance of 64,738 km (40,226 mi). [10] Hydra is the outermost moon of Pluto, orbiting beyond Kerberos. [11] Similarly to all of Pluto's moons, Hydra's orbit is nearly circular and is coplanar to Charon's orbit; all of Pluto's moons have very low orbital inclinations to Pluto's equator. [11]
A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit around the Sun, massive enough to be gravitationally rounded, but insufficient to achieve orbital dominance like the eight classical planets of the Solar System. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto, which for decades was regarded as a planet before the "dwarf" concept ...
Triton ( lower left) compared to the Moon ( upper left) and Earth ( right ), to scale. Triton is the seventh-largest moon and sixteenth-largest object in the Solar System and is modestly larger than the dwarf planets Pluto and Eris. It is also the largest retrograde moon in the Solar System.