Charon also has an abnormally circular orbit of Pluto, with its orbital eccentricity (a value between 0 and 1, where 0 is a perfect circle and 1 is an open-ended parabola) only being about 0.000161.

The gas giants outside our solar system are not capable of hosting extraterrestrial life, but do offer clues in a lingering ...

New research suggests that billions of years ago, Pluto may have captured its largest moon, Charon, with a very brief icy ...

Pluto was always in a tough spot when it came to being a planet. Just 1,477 miles across, it's only one-fifth the diameter of Earth. It did have five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and ...

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Astro Brief is a collaboration between KSMU, the Missouri Space Grant, and MSU's Department of Physics, Astronomy and ...

“New Horizons shattered a major paradigm of planetary science,” says Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “Pluto turns out to have as much complexity as Mars or Earth, so much so that I ...

But on Charon, Pluto's nearest moon, they found this most familiar of geological features. There was more, on Pluto itself, that recalled the American mid-west. Dark streaks on Pluto's plains ...