If there’s one thing that 21st-century telescopes have shown us about Pluto, it’s that there’s still a lot we don’t know about our very far-off neighbor. Today we look into just one of Pluto’s many mysteries: the formation of its complex five-moon system.
Once predicted to be geologically boring and unchanging bodies, Pluto and its largest moon Charon have turned out to be surprisingly complex and even geologically active worlds.
Get ready to come up with a new mnemonic for the planets. The orbits of distant objects suggest that there may be something lurking in the outer Solar System as big as Neptune!
Pluto: the last and final of the ‘original’ 9 planets of the Solar System to be visited by a probe. NASA’s New Horizons arrived at this tiny world at the edge of the Solar System earlier this week bringing into sharp focus for the first time. Science was a plentiful from every new image that was released, so here’s a quick recap for you, just in case you blinked and missed it…
In July of this year (2015), NASA’s New Horizons mission will fly past Pluto and its moons. It will map the surface of the Plutonian system in unprecedented detail, revealing craters and other surface features for the first time. In preparation for the deluge of newly discovered craters, mountains, crevasses and other surface features, Mamajek et al. discuss a naming system for Pluto and its moons.
The years of 2014 and 2015 may well be known as the time when our exploration of the solar system truly took off, as we explored asteroids, comets, and minor planets. Here’s a look back at what we’ve accomplished in the last year, and what we’re about to achieve in the year to come.