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The innermost and largest moon, Charon, was discovered by James Christy on 22 June 1978, nearly half a century after Pluto was discovered. This led to a substantial revision in estimates of Pluto's size, which had previously assumed that the observed mass and reflected light of the system were all attributable to Pluto alone.
The moons of the trans-Neptunian objects (other than Charon) have not been included, because they appear to follow the normal situation for TNOs rather than the moons of Saturn and Uranus, and become solid at a larger size (900–1000 km diameter, rather than 400 km as for the moons of Saturn and Uranus).
Many TNOs are often just assumed to have Pluto's density of 2.0 g/cm 3, but it is just as likely that they have a comet-like density of only 0.5 g/cm 3. [ 4 ] For example, if a TNO is incorrectly assumed to have a mass of 3.59 × 10 20 kg based on a radius of 350 km with a density of 2 g/cm 3 but is later discovered to have a radius of only 175 ...
Hydra is the outermost moon of Pluto, orbiting beyond Kerberos. [11] Similarly to all of Pluto's moons, Hydra's orbit is nearly circular and is coplanar to Charon's orbit; all of Pluto's moons have very low orbital inclinations to Pluto's equator. [11]
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 has roughly one-sixth the mass of the Moon, and one-third its volume. Pluto has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometres; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its orbital distance of 39.5 AU (5.91 billion km; 3 ...
Before 2006, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were considered as planets. Below is a partial list of these mnemonics: "Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serve Useful Needs, Perhaps" – The structure of this sentence, which is current in the 1950s, suggests that it may have originated before Pluto's discovery.
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