Skip to comments.NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around
Pluto Posted on 07/20/2011 8:14:18 AM PDT by Red Badger
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth
moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new
satellite -- temporarily designated P4 -- was uncovered in a
Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet. The
new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an
estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By
comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043
km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range
of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km). "I find it
remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny
object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles
(5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in
Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with
Hubble. The finding is a result of ongoing work to support
NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the