| archmage | Date: Saturday, 14-July-2012, 8:58 PM | Message # 1 |
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-- dragon lord--
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| July 13, 2012: A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered another moon orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto.
They say the new moon, Pluto's 5th, is likely irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. Provisionally designated S/2012 (134340) 1, it was detected in nine separate sets of images taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on June 26, 27, 29, and July 7 and 9. The moon circles Pluto in a 58,000 mile-diameter orbit.
“The moons form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls,” notes team leader Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
The Pluto team is intrigued that such a small planet can have such a complex collection of satellites. The new discovery provides additional clues for unraveling how the Pluto system formed and evolved. The favored theory is that all the moons are relics of a collision between Pluto and another large Kuiper Belt object billions of years ago. (The Kuiper Belt is a broad zone of icy Pluto-like bodies orbiting beyond Neptune. Pluto itself is considered to be a Kuiper Belt object.)
Full article/source - http://science.nasa.gov/science...._pluto5
Message edited by sanju - Saturday, 14-July-2012, 8:59 PM |
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