Pluto’s moons

Pluto possesses five known moons. Charon, by far the largest, is fully half the size of Pluto. It revolves around Pluto—more accurately, the two bodies revolve around a common centre of mass—at a distance of about 19,640 km (12,200 miles), equal to about eight Pluto diameters. (By contrast, Earth’s Moon is a little more than one-fourth the size of Earth and is separated from the latter by about 30 Earth diameters.) Charon’s period of revolution is exactly equal to the rotation period of Pluto itself; in other words, Charon is in synchronous orbit around Pluto. As a result, Charon is visible from only one hemisphere of Pluto. It remains above the same location on Pluto’s surface, never rising or setting (just as do communications satellites in geostationary orbits over Earth; see spaceflight: Earth orbit). In addition, as with most moons in the solar system, Charon is in a state of synchronous rotation; i.e., it always presents the same face to Pluto.

Charon is somewhat less reflective (has a lower albedo—about 0.25) than Pluto and is more neutral in colour. Its spectrum reveals the presence of water ice, which is the dominant surface constituent. There is no hint of the solid methane that is so obvious on its larger neighbour. Charon’s surface also has patches of ammonia in some of its impact craters. As discussed above in the section The surface and interior, Charon’s density implies that the moon contains materials such as silicates and organic compounds that are denser than water ice. For additional data about Charon, see the table.

Pluto’s other four moons—Hydra, Nix, Kerberos, and Styx—are much smaller than Charon. All four are elongated. They revolve around Pluto outside Charon’s path in nearly circular orbits (like Charon) and in the same orbital plane as Charon. The orbital radius of Hydra is about 64,721 km (40,216 miles); that of Kerberos is 57,750 km (35,884 miles); that of Nix is 48,690 km (30,254 miles); and that of Styx is 42,413 km (26,354 miles). Styx, Nix, and Kerberos are as reflective as Charon, while Hydra is more reflective.

For every orbit completed by Charon, Hydra completes about one-sixth of an orbit, Kerberos about one-fifth, Nix about one-fourth, and Styx one-third. This means that the orbital periods of Hydra, Kerberos, Nix, and Styx are in a 6:5:4:3 ratio. These relationships of the orbital periods, which are approximately in the ratios of small whole numbers, suggest that Hydra, Nix, Kerberos, and Styx are in stable dynamic resonances with Charon and with each other; that is, all five bodies pass one another periodically, interacting via gravity in a way that tends to maintain the regularity of their encounters. Because of the ever-changing gravitational field of Pluto and Charon (which rotate around each other), Nix and Hydra rotate chaotically with their poles sometimes flipping. Unlike most of the other satellites in the solar system, Pluto’s four smaller moons are not in synchronous rotation with the planet; that is, their rotation period is not the same as their orbital period. Rotation periods range from 0.4295 day for Hydra to 5.31 days for Kerberos.

Discoveries of Pluto and its moons

When Pluto was found, it was considered the third planet to be discovered, after Uranus and Neptune, as opposed to the six planets that have been visible in the sky to the naked eye since ancient times. The existence of a ninth planet had been postulated beginning in the late 19th century on the basis of apparent perturbations of the orbital motion of Uranus, which suggested that a more-distant body was gravitationally disturbing it. Astronomers later realized that these perturbations were spurious—the gravitational force from Pluto’s small mass is not strong enough to have been the source of the suspected disturbances. Thus, Pluto’s discovery was a remarkable coincidence attributable to careful observations rather than to accurate prediction of the existence of a hypothetical planet.

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Planets and the Earth’s Moon

The search for the expected planet was supported most actively at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, U.S., in the early 20th century. It was initiated by the founder of the observatory, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer who had achieved notoriety through his highly publicized claims of canal sightings on Mars. After two unsuccessful attempts to find the planet prior to Lowell’s death in 1916, an astronomical camera built specifically for this purpose and capable of collecting light from a wide field of sky was put into service in 1929, and a young amateur astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, was hired to carry out the search. On February 18, 1930, less than one year after he began his work, Tombaugh found Pluto in the constellation Gemini. The object appeared as a dim “star” of the 15th magnitude that slowly changed its position against the fixed background stars as it pursued its 248-year orbit around the Sun. Although Lowell and other astronomers had predicted that the unknown planet would be much larger and brighter than the object Tombaugh found, Pluto was quickly accepted as the expected ninth planet. The symbol invented for it, ♇, stands both for the first two letters of Pluto and for the initials of Percival Lowell.

Charon was discovered in 1978 on images of Pluto that had been recorded photographically at the U.S. Naval Observatory station in Flagstaff, fewer than 6 km (3.7 miles) from the site of Pluto’s discovery. These images were being recorded by James W. Christy and Robert S. Harrington in an attempt to obtain more-accurate measurements of Pluto’s orbit. The new satellite was named after the boatman in Greek mythology who ferries dead souls to Hades’ realm in the underworld.

Prior to the discovery of Charon, Pluto was thought to be larger and more massive than it actually is; there was no way to determine either quantity directly. Even in the discovery images, Charon appears as an unresolved bump on the side of Pluto, an indication of the observational difficulties posed by the relative nearness of the two bodies, their great distance from Earth, and the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. Only near the end of the 20th century, with the availability of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Earth-based instruments equipped with adaptive optics that compensate for atmospheric turbulence, did astronomers first resolve Pluto and Charon into separate bodies.

A team of nine astronomers working in the United States discovered two small moons, Hydra and Nix, in 2005 in images made with the Hubble Space Telescope during a concerted search for objects traveling around Pluto as small as 25 km (16 miles) in diameter. To confirm the orbits, the astronomers checked Hubble images of Pluto and Charon made in 2002 for surface-mapping studies and found faint but definite indications of two objects moving along the orbital paths calculated from the 2005 images.

In 2011 six astronomers discovered the small moon Kerberos in images made with the HST. As with the discovery of Nix and Hydra, the astronomers checked earlier Hubble images and found faint traces of what appeared to be Kerberos in images from 2006 and 2010. The HST was used again in 2012 to find Styx.