Charon gets some brothers
In all the excitement of revamping my blog and adding the Space Blogroll over the last few days, I missed this story: two more moons discovered orbiting Pluto.
The two moons, each somewhere between 45 and 160 kilometers in diameter (it is kind of hard to pin down, as they are 1/5000th of the brightness of Pluto's moon Charon; 23rd magnitude), were found using the Hubble Space Telescope. They are orbiting Pluto in circular orbits in the same plane as Charon, both about 44000 kilometers from Pluto. These moons carry the somewhat bland names of S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2 for now, but will be named by their discoverers once the orbits are confirmed. Those names will then be submitted to the International Astronomical Union for official acceptance.
Technorati Tags: Space, Pluto
(hat tip to True Anomaly)
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