For decades, astronomers have tried to determine how Pluto acquired its unusually large moon Charon, which is about half the size of the dwarf planet. Now, new research suggests that Pluto and Charon ...

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At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; ...

It took a journey of more than nine years and three billion miles (~five billion km), but New Horizons made it all the way to Pluto, and gave us our first up-close look at our Solar System's outermost ...

The icy volcanism of Charon may be caused by its internal ocean freezing, expanding, and cracking the outer shell of the moon if it was thinner than expected. When you purchase through links on our ...

New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto in July 2015. At the time, the cameras on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured Pluto rotating over the course of a full “Pluto day,” which is 6.4 ...

Pluto may have been demoted to non-planet status, but it still commands a court of five moons, as is fitting for the king of darkness; after all, Pluto is the Roman equivalent of the Greek God Hades.

Pluto and Charon don’t behave like a typical planet and moon system. Instead of Charon orbiting inside Pluto’s body, both objects orbit a point in space between them called the barycenter. That’s why ...

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 ago, ...

The dark red pole on Pluto's largest moon Charon may be some of the dwarf planet's own siphoned-off atmosphere. Images and data captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft suggest that the reddish ...

The spacecraft New Horizons sped past Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015, gathering data from seven onboard instruments. Shortly thereafter, it began offloading that data in a stream of digital bits ...

An array of images shows Pluto from all sides, as seen by NASA’s New Horizons probe over the course of one full Plutonian day (6.4 Earth days) from July 7 to 13. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI) The ...