New Partners: Hubble finds more moons around Pluto
By Ron Cowen
Already deemed the oddball among planets, Pluto just got a new wrinkle. Two, actually. This week, astronomers announced that the Hubble Space Telescope has spied a pair of previously unrecognized moons orbiting Pluto, giving this outer solar system body a total of three satellites. If the finding is confirmed, Pluto will be the only object beyond Neptune known to have more than one moon. About 20 percent of the objects in the Kuiper belt, a reservoir of cometlike objects even farther from the sun than Pluto is, have single partners.
Researchers “will have to take these new moons into account when modeling the formation of the Pluto system,” says Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. He and Hal Weaver of the John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., reported the findings during a NASA press briefing.