Most moons orbit their planets, but Pluto and Charon are different—they revolve around a point in space between them! 🔄 Why does this happen, and what did NASA’s New Horizons mission reveal about ...

This once-in-a-generation shift is a pivotal power play in a saga that will unfold in the years and decades to come.

So things stood for 65 years. Although Pluto's orbit was more elongated than the other planets' (and even crossed the orbit of Neptune—not the kind of thing you would expect a decent planet to ...

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 ...

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 ...

(See what scientists say about Pluto’s status as a planet.) As early as the 1840s, a tricky calculus foretold the existence of a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. Calculations based on Neptune ...

"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!" ...

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 ...

Researchers accounted for the previously overlooked structures of the dwarf planet and moon in computer simulations of a ...