Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.

With Charon being half Pluto’s size, experts have struggled to explain how it ended up in the dwarf planet’s domain. Now, a team of researchers has suggested that Pluto may have secured Charon ...

The number of planets that orbit the sun depends on what you mean by “planet,” and that’s not so easy to define ...

"We were definitely surprised by the 'kiss' part of kiss-and-capture. There hasn't really been a kind of impact before where the two bodies only temporarily merge before re-separating!" ...

Pluto has five moons, but Charon stands out from the rest. Charon is half the size of Pluto, “making it the largest known moon relative to its parent planet in our solar system,” NASA notes.

Charon is large in size relative to Pluto, and is locked in a tight orbit with the dwarf planet. A new simulation suggests how it ended up there. By Jonathan O’Callaghan Some 4.5 billion years ...

When astronomers found a large world farther out than Pluto, it became one of the final nails in the coffin of our ninth ...

The theory could explain how the dwarf planet (yeah, we wish Pluto was still a planet, too) could snare a moon that is around half its size. This "kiss and capture" process represents a new theory ...

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The theory could explain how the dwarf planet (yeah, we wish Pluto was still a planet, too) could snare a moon that is around half its size. The team behind this research thinks that two frigid ...