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 ...

Because Charon couldn't sink into Pluto in this scenario, it remained beyond the so-called "co-rotation radius" of both bodies. As a result, it could not rotate as fast as Pluto, which meant the ...

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 ...

And the new research may offer evidence for a subsurface ocean beneath Pluto’s icy crust. Charon and Earth’s moon are both a large fraction of the size of the main body they orbit, which is ...

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 ...

Pluto can be thought of as being part of a binary system with its biggest satellite, Charon (pictured). Scientists have long thought that this system formed as the result of a collision between ...

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 ...

end up putting it in the right orbit. You get two things right for the price of one," said Erik Asphaug, senior study author. The "kiss and capture" scenario suggests that Pluto and Charon ...