featureless ball on the fringes of the solar system, the spacecraft images revealed a geologically diverse world, with mountains, ice sheets, pits, cliffs, cracks, and valleys. Charon, its biggest ...

Charon. It started with a collision — one that didn’t destroy the two balls of rock and ice but spun them into the unmistakable shape of a snowman, until tidal forces separated them into their ...

New simulations of that encounter have found that during a chance meeting in the outer solar system, Charon and Pluto may ... off each other like billiard balls in a so-called hit-and-run collision.

Pluto and Charon likely exchanged some material between each other but didn't lose a lot of material to the solar system. Pluto is bigger and started and ended up with much more rock than ice ...

Pluto and Charon are in a region of the outer solar system beyond Neptune called the Kuiper belt, which makes them both very rocky and icy. By including these properties in their model ...

Scientists have discovered a new type of planetary collision called “kiss-and-capture,” where Pluto and proto-Charon briefly ...

"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!" ...

"Charon then begins its slow outward migration towards its current position." The team thinks the initial collision happened very early in solar system history, probably tens of millions of years ...

But these theories didn’t account for the fact that Pluto and Charon may have more structural integrity as icy, rocky bodies on the frigid edge of the solar system. “Pluto and Charon are ...