Pluto’s New Moon

A Dwarf Planet with Moons
Pluto has been in the news a lot lately. The New Horizons spacecraft is headed out to swoop past this icy dwarf planet and show us what it really looks like. That will happen in July 2015 — just three years from now. In the meantime, the Hubble Space Telescope keeps checking out this distant world and finding new moons around it. The HST observations are an ongoing project to make sure that mission planners for New Horizons have a good idea of the known hazards (i.e. things that the spacecraft could hit) as it whizzes past Pluto in a few years.
The dwarf planet Pluto and its five moons. Will HST find more? Courtesy NASA/STScI.
Last week, the HST folks announced the discovery of a fifth moon orbiting Pluto. For now, it’s called P5, and in time, it will get an official name.
Pluto’s moons, with the exception of its largest moon Charon, are pretty small. This newly discovered one is no bigger than 15 miles across. Now, it’s kind of intriguing that Pluto has so many of its own moons, and scientists are busily figuring out how it could have gained such a ...