Wobbly Moons Studied By Hubble

Hubble has revealed fascinating new details about Pluto’s four smaller moons.

12:48 05 June 2015

The Hubble telescope has observed that Pluto’s four smaller moons are somewhat chaotic in their behaviour. They are very likely wobbling end over end as they move through their orbits. 

 

"If you can imagine what it would be like to live on [these moons], you would literally not know where the Sun was coming up tomorrow," said Mark Showalter from the Seti Institute, US.

 

"The Sun might rise in the west and set in the east. The Sun might rise in the west and set in the north for that matter.

 

"In fact, if you had real estate on the north pole… you might discover one day you’re on the south pole."

 

Nasa’s New Horizon spacecraft is currently bearing down on the Pluto system and may be used to assess the discovery, which was published in Nature journal. The spacecraft will gather more information on the dwarf planet and its largest moon, Charon including smaller bodies, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra – all were discovered by Hubble after New Horizons launched from Earth in 2006. 

 

John Spencer, a mission scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, explained: "We’ll be taking pictures of Nix and Hydra that will be 50 to 100 pixels [across] - maybe bigger depending how bright they turn out to be.

 

"So, we’ll see a lot of their surfaces. We’ll see if they have craters or fractures, or anything like that and we’ll get the composition of their surfaces."