For decades, Pluto was celebrated as the ninth planet of our solar system. However, in 2006, the International Astronomical ...

And the new research may offer evidence for a subsurface ocean beneath Pluto’s icy crust. Charon and Earth’s moon are both a large fraction of the size of the main body they orbit, which is ...

"It's half Pluto's size and 12% of its mass, which makes it much more similar to the Earth's moon than any other moon in the solar system." For comparison, our moon is just a quarter of the size ...

“Something big hits Pluto, and you get Charon, but like with the Earth-moon system, we don’t fully know how that works and the conditions under which that occurs,” Denton said. “It’s a ...

In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union made the controversial, but correct, decision to demote Pluto from its ...

But Pluto and Charon are different from Earth and the Moon, too – they are both smaller (the Moon is 3,475 kilometers across) and much, much colder, made up of rock and ice. When the researchers ...

Images) Researchers studying Pluto and Charon have long drawn a parallel to how Earth got its moon. The prevailing thought is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ...

Dwarf planet Pluto and our Earth are the only two worlds in our solar system with very large moons. These may have come about by a "kiss and capture" process, which preserves a moon's large size.

A new study suggests that the origin of Pluto's largest moon was quite different than our own. Here's what you need to know.

Jan. 7, 2025 — A researcher has used advanced models that indicate that the formation of Pluto and Charon may parallel that of the Earth-Moon system. Both systems include a moon that is a large ...