Another Moon

By Spicy, 5th Feb 2012 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/3-3u1b76/
Posted in Wikinut>News>Science

This is a fantastic discovery about the another moon around Pluto. The fourth moon P4 was first seen in a photo taken by Hubble space telescope and was confirmed in subsequent Hubble pictures. Hubble’s cameras enabled to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than three billion miles (5 billion kms).

The fourth moon P4:

Tiny Moon around Pluto

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite temporary name for the newly discovered moon ‘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). Hubble’s cameras enabled to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion kms).

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA’s New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble’s mapping of Pluto’s surface and discovery of its satellites have been invaluable to planning for New Horizons’ close encounter.

Location of fourth moon:

Pluto System

The fourth moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, both of which were discovered by Hubble in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the U.S. Naval Observatory. All four of Pluto’s moons are believed to have formed when Pluto and another planet-sized body collided in the early history of our solar system. Earth’s Moon may have formed the same way.

This another moon P4 was first seen in a photo taken by Hubble on June 28 and was confirmed in subsequent Hubble pictures taken July 3 and July 18. In June, Pluto came between a star and Earth, casting a small shadow on Earth’s surface that astronomers tracked across the Pacific.This event, known as an occultation, occurred on June 23 with the help of a big telescope taken images of Pluto and its thin atmosphere.
Now it is possible learning more about Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere because the starlight behind it dims in a specific way, which lets astronomers determine atmospheric temperature and density,Pluto cast an extremely long shadow: it has an average distance of 5.9 billion miles (9.495 billion km) from the Sun, compared to Earth’s distance of 93 million miles (149.7 million km).

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Spicy
Hi friends. very nice to meet all of you.

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Madan
5th Feb 2012 (#)

Interesting info.

Another Moon

The fourth moon P4:

Location of fourth moon:

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