Astroblog: Pluto's Moons in Nature

Friday, February 24, 2006

Pluto's Moons in Nature

Click to enlarge (or even see anything sensible) Pluto, Charon and P2 as seen from moon P1, image generated in Celestia.
If you have been hiding under a rock, you won't know that a team using the Hubble Space telescope found two more moons of Pluto. Now the full report of this discovery is out in the journal Nature. The actual articles require a subscription, but you can read the informativeNews & Views article, and listen to the Nature Podcast which gives details of the discovery. Unlike Charon, which is almost the size of Pluto, S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2 (don't those names just trip off the tongue), are less than 100 Km in size, Charon and the tiny Moons probably originated in a giant impact with Pluto.

I've made a Celestia SSC file for S/2005 P1 and P2, you can download it here (then copy it into your extras folder in Celestia). WARNING, the published paper didn't contain some data, like Ascending Node, Arg of Pericenter and Mean Anomaly. I've used the values for Charon for these until more complete data are published. So the orbits won't be entirely accurate, but reasonable enough to go on your own flight through the Pluto system. I'm writing a CEL script that will take you on a tour of these new worlds. I'll put that up soon I hope.

Update Pop over to Tom's Astroblog for details of the February 15 confirmation of the Moons existance. Also, Nature have put up a free streaming video interview with the Moons discoverers.

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 12:27 am