According to NASA, Christy also chose the name Charon became the first four letters were the same as his wife's Charlene. Charon is made mostly of water ice. When the New Horizons spacecraft flew ...

Pluto landed its largest moon, Charon, with a 'kiss'—overturning decades of scientific assumptions about how planetary bodies form and evolve. This is the conclusion of a new study, conducted at ...

Charon is half the size of Pluto, “making it the largest known moon relative to its parent planet in our solar system,” NASA notes. So how did Pluto get its chonky companion? A new study ...

This composite image of Pluto, right, and Charon, its largest moon, showcases photos captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Unlike how scientists ...

Charon, and a host of other Kuiper Belt Objects,” said Alyssa Rhoden, a staff scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, in an email. Rhoden and Denton both began working through the NASA ...

With Charon being half Pluto’s size ... gravitationally bound,” says planetary scientist Adeene Denton, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary ...

Credit: NASA/Robert Lea (created with Canva) New research suggests that billions of years ago, Pluto may have captured its largest moon, Charon, with a very brief icy "kiss." The theory could ...

who is a NASA Postdoctoral Researcher at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and lead author of the study. Simulation snapshot of Pluto and Charon during “kiss-and-capture” scenario that could ...

It might also have resulted in the formation of Pluto’s four other known moons — Nix, Styx, Kerberos and Hydra — which are tiny compared with Charon and were glimpsed when NASA’s New ...

The NASA New Horizons' high-resolution enhanced color view captured a detailed perspective of the rocky, icy moon Charon. - NASA/JHUAPL Instead, Pluto and Charon likely remained much the same ...