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Pluto's origin and identity had long puzzled astronomers. One early hypothesis was that Pluto was an escaped moon of Neptune [161] knocked out of orbit by Neptune's largest moon, Triton. This idea was eventually rejected after dynamical studies showed it to be impossible because Pluto never approaches Neptune in its orbit. [162]
From its discovery in 1846 until the discovery of Pluto in 1930, Neptune was the farthest known planet. When Pluto was discovered, it was considered a planet, and Neptune thus became the second-farthest known planet, except for a 20-year period between 1979 and 1999 when Pluto's elliptical orbit brought it closer than Neptune to the Sun, making ...
In 1988, A. A. Jackson and R. M. Killen studied the stability of Pluto's resonance with Neptune by placing test "Planet X-es" with various masses and at various distances from Pluto. Pluto and Neptune's orbits are in a 3:2 resonance, which prevents their collision or even any close approaches, regardless of their separation in the z axis. It ...
Such a fate awaits the moons Phobos of Mars (within 30 to 50 million years), [111] Triton of Neptune (in 3.6 billion years), [112] and at least 16 small satellites of Uranus and Neptune. Uranus's Desdemona may even collide with one of its neighboring moons. [113] A third possibility is where the primary and moon are tidally locked to each other ...
It was used to integrate out to 845 million years – some 20% of the age of the Solar System. In 1988, Sussman and Wisdom found data using the Orrery that revealed that Pluto's orbit shows signs of chaos, due in part to its peculiar resonance with Neptune. [9] If Pluto's orbit is chaotic, then technically the whole Solar System is chaotic.
Moons of Pluto. The dwarf planet Pluto has five natural satellites. [1] In order of distance from Pluto, they are Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. [2] Charon, the largest, is mutually tidally locked with Pluto, and is massive enough that Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary dwarf planet.
Triton dominates the Neptunian moon system, with over 99.5% of its total mass. This imbalance may reflect the elimination of many of Neptune's original satellites following Triton's capture. [4][5] Triton (lower left) compared to the Moon (upper left) and Earth (right), to scale. Triton is the seventh-largest moon and sixteenth-largest object ...
The Kuiper belt (/ ˈkaɪpər / KY-pər) [ 1 ] is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. [ 2 ] It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. [ 3 ][ 4 ] Like the asteroid belt ...