Hubble Discovers a New Moon Around Pluto

NASA.gov ^ | July 20, 2011 | Tony Phillips

[MikeD]

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 -- popped up 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).

"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble's mapping of Pluto's surface and discovery of its satellites have been invaluable to planning for New Horizons' close encounter.

"This is a fantastic discovery," said New Horizons’ principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."

The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble discovered in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the U.S. Naval Observatory and first resolved using Hubble in 1990 as a separate body from Pluto.

The dwarf planet’s entire moon system is believed to have formed by a collision between Pluto and another planet-sized body early in the history of the solar system. The smashup flung material that coalesced into the family of satellites observed around Pluto.

Lunar rocks returned to Earth from the Apollo missions led to the theory that our moon was the result of a similar collision between Earth and a Mars-sized body 4.4 billion years ago. Scientists believe material blasted off Pluto's moons by micrometeoroid impacts may form rings around the dwarf planet, but the Hubble photographs have not detected any so far.

"This surprising observation is a powerful reminder of Hubble's ability as a general purpose astronomical observatory to make astounding, unintended discoveries," said Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

P4 was first seen in a photo taken with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on June 28. It was confirmed in subsequent Hubble pictures taken on July 3 and July 18. The moon was not seen in earlier Hubble images because the exposure times were shorter. There is a chance it appeared as a very faint smudge in 2006 images, but was overlooked because it was obscured.

For images and more information about Hubble, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

[numberonepal]

Thats pretty neat considering they didnt know it existed........

Indeed they did. They knew of all the planets including knowing the colors of Neptune and Uranus. It was chronicled many times in sculpture and in cuneiform. They also knew of precession and the 12 houses of the zodiac.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks MikeD.

• NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto
• Astronomy Picture of the Day -- Pluto's P4

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[SunkenCiv]

The existence of Pluto wasn’t known to the Sumerians. They were similarly ignorant of Neptune and Uranus. If it were chronicled many times in sculpture and in cuneiform, it would have been remarked on by actual scholars of cuneiform and Sumerian, rather than by Zecharia Sitchin. The fact is, it doesn’t occur even once.

[SunkenCiv]

Pluto’s got relatively no competition, so stuff that wanders by (which will be moving fairly slowly in relation to Pluto) is much more likely to be captured, and as a capture would have cockeyed orbits until they either get chucked back out, or run into Pluto or one of its moons, or over a period of time interacting with Pluto and its other moons, wind up in a more regularized orbit.

That said, Neptune’s moon system is haywire, with one of the three largest ones nearly at escape. Neptune’s more massive than Uranus, which has a rotational axis nearly in the ecliptic, but a nice normal moon system. One way to interpret this has been an encounter (sometime in the past) with a passing star. That would of course mean that the Uranian moon system was acquired later, after the encounter which tipped Uranus, but managed to get regularized quickly; Neptune managed to *not* get tipped (although without knowing what its axis was like before this hypothetical encounter, we can’t say that for sure) but nearly had its moons torn away.

Harrington and VanFlandern postulated an encounter with a planetary body possibly still in orbit around our Sun, which caused these phenomena. In addition, Pluto is an escaped moon of Neptune under this scenario.

[numberonepal]

Keep on ignoring the evidence. It’s right there in front of your eyes, but don’t believe them. If you are going to knock someone’s work, you might want to actually read it first.

[SunkenCiv]

Keep on reading the BS, it obviously suits you better.

[numberonepal]

Keep on reading the BS, it obviously suits you better.

I will and I'll know the truth.