Instead of a typical planet-moon setup, Pluto and Charon became a binary system. They circle a shared point in space, locked in a delicate, endless orbit. Their strange gravitational dance has ...

As they separated and this icy kiss ended, the team thinks that Pluto would have torqued Charon into a close, higher circular orbit from which the moon would have migrated outward. "The 'kiss' in ...

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 ...

When Pluto and Charon hit, they may have stuck together, rotating through space as one unit until they pushed against each other, according to a new study, sending the moon into a stable orbit.

Scientists suggest that 4.5 billion years ago, Pluto and Charon experienced a "kiss and capture" event, where they collided gently before Charon was trapped in orbit around Pluto. This finding ...

The report, published in “Nature Geoscience,” describes how the minuscule dwarf planet could lure in Charon, a space rock nearly half its size, to orbit. The authors suggest that Pluto and ...

Charon is large in size relative to Pluto, and is locked in a tight orbit with the dwarf planet. A new simulation suggests how it ended up there. By Jonathan O’Callaghan Some 4.5 billion years ...

How did Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, form? This is what a recent study published in Nature Geoscience hopes to address as an international team of researchers led by the University of Arizona ...

They rotate as one body until Pluto pushes Charon out into a stable orbit. "Most cosmic collisions are what we call a hit-and-run, when an impactor hits a planet and keeps going," Denton continued.