Whereas a moon usually orbits a planet, both Pluto and Charon orbit a point in space between them — their common center of mass. The other four moons in the system — Styx, Nix, Kerberos and ...

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

While the moon clearly orbits Earth, Pluto and Charon orbit each other. “Charon is HUGE relative to Pluto, to the point where they are actually a binary,” Denton explains to Space.com’s ...

In fact, Charon is so large compared to its host world that it and Pluto actually orbit a common center of mass (or "barycenter") that is outside the surface of Pluto itself. This peculiar mass ...

After about 30 hours of contact, Charon separated from Pluto and began to migrate into the orbit it has today. Denton and colleagues found that two other pairs of objects, dwarf planet Eris and ...

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 ...

Because Charon is just over half the size of Pluto, the two bodies then began orbiting each other in a cosmic dance in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit. However, a recent study in Nature ...

Unlike Earth, where the Moon orbits the planet, Pluto and Charon orbit each other, forming a binary system that is more similar to the Earth-moon system than any other moon in the solar system.

Pluto has five moons, but Charon stands out from the rest ... “A dwarf planet is an object in orbit around the sun that is large enough to pull itself into a nearly round shape but has not ...

The fact Pluto's orbital axis is more or less perfectly aligned with Charon's highly suggests they were both spun out of the same rotating mess following a collision, but the size and orbit of ...