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An intense search conducted by New Horizons confirmed that no moons larger than 4.5 km in diameter exist out to distances up to 180,000 km from Pluto (6% of the stable region for prograde moons), assuming Charon-like albedoes of 0.38 (for smaller distances, this threshold is still smaller).
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Nix is a natural satellite of Pluto, with a diameter of 49.8 km (30.9 mi) across its longest dimension. [3] It was discovered along with Pluto's outermost moon Hydra on 15 May 2005 by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, [1] and was named after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night. [10]
It is about half the diameter and an eighth the mass of Pluto, a dwarf planet that resides in a frigid region of the outer Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, beyond the most distant planet Neptune.
Pluto's smaller moons, including Hydra, were thought to have formed from debris ejected from a massive collision between Pluto and another Kuiper belt object, similarly to how the Moon is believed to have formed from debris ejected by a large collision of Earth. [25] The ejecta from the collision would then coalesce into the moons of Pluto. [26]
NASA launched the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 to learn more about the icy dwarf planet Pluto. Here are some of the first photos from that mission, taken from between 125 and 115 million miles away.
Its orbital period of 20.16155 days [4] is about 5.0% from a 1:3 mean-motion resonance with the Charon–Pluto orbital period of 6.387 days. With the other moons Nix, Kerberos , and Hydra, it forms part of an unusual 1:3:4:5:6 (period ratio) sequence of near resonances . [ 11 ]
NASA's New Horizons probe has returned the first color images of Pluto. The small blurry dots in the newly-released photo are Pluto and Charon, the largest of Pluto's moons. New Horizons captured ...