Scientists have discovered a new type of planetary collision called “kiss-and-capture,” where Pluto and proto-Charon briefly ...

Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.

Whereas a moon usually orbits a planet, both Pluto and Charon orbit a point in space between them — their common center of mass. The other four moons in the system — Styx, Nix, Kerberos 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 ...

While the moon clearly orbits Earth, Pluto and Charon orbit each other. “Charon is HUGE relative to Pluto, to the point where they are actually a binary,” Denton explains to Space.com’s ...

In fact, Charon is so large compared to its host world that it and Pluto actually orbit a common center of mass (or "barycenter") that is outside the surface of Pluto itself. This peculiar mass ...

After the collision, the two bodies would have spun together rapidly for around 10 hours before separating. Charon then began migrating slowly outward to its current near-circular orbit around ...

Pluto and its moon Charon may have been briefly locked together in a cosmic “kiss”, before the dwarf planet released the smaller body and recaptured it in its orbit. Charon is the largest of ...

Charon and Earth’s moon are both a large fraction of the size of the main body they orbit, which is unlike other smaller moons orbiting planets throughout our solar system. (Pluto has four ...

While the moon clearly orbits Earth, Pluto and Charon orbit each other. “Charon is HUGE relative to Pluto, to the point where they are actually a binary,” Denton explains to Space.com’s ...