This once-in-a-generation shift is a pivotal power play in a saga that will unfold in the years and decades to come.

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.

Pluto would have been rotating once every three hours at the time (the length of a day on Pluto ... left it trapped in Pluto’s orbit. Bill McKinnon, a planetary scientist at Washington ...

Pluto can be thought of as being part of a binary system with its biggest satellite, Charon (pictured). Scientists have long thought that this system formed as the result of a collision between ...

sticking together to form a snowman-like figure and rotating as one body until Pluto essentially pushed Charon into a more distant orbit over time. “We were definitely surprised by the ‘kiss ...

Researchers accounted for the previously overlooked structures of the dwarf planet and moon in computer simulations of a ...

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 ...

After being intertwined in a lopsided rotation, the pair became unstuck and Charon, being the smaller of the two, was doomed to a near-circular orbit around Pluto ... the First Time in 6 ...

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 ...