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Charon (/ ˈ k ɛər ɒ n,-ə n / KAIR-on, -ən or / ˈ ʃ ær ə n / SHARR-ən), [note 1] or (134340) Pluto I, is the largest of the five known natural satellites of the dwarf planet Pluto. It has a mean radius of 606 km (377 mi). Charon is the sixth-largest known trans-Neptunian object after Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Gonggong. [18]
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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 distance between Charon and Pluto is about 12,200 miles (19,640 km), compared to the 238,855 miles (384,400 km) on average separating Earth from its moon. Most of Charon's surface is gray ...
Charon and Earth’s moon are both a large fraction of the size of the main body they orbit, which is unlike other smaller moons orbiting planets throughout our solar system. (Pluto has four ...
Photo of Charon centered on Ripley Crater. Nostromo Chasma crosses Ripley vertically. Vader is the dark crater at 12:00, Organa Crater is at 9:00, Skywalker Crater at 8:00, Gallifrey Macula and Tardis Chasma at 4:00. Craters on Charon are named after characters associated with science fiction and fantasy.
In more modern telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes using adaptive optics, separate images of Pluto and Charon can be resolved, and the New Horizons probe took images showing some of Charon's surface features. In late 2008, the asteroid 129564 Christy was named in his honor.
Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site has been known to host copyrighted content. Its photo gallery FAQ states that all of the images in the photo gallery are in the public domain "Unless otherwise noted."