[IMG]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/61513000/jpg/_61513431_61512799.jpg[/IMG]
[B]Hubble spots fifth Pluto moon[/B]
[QUOTE]Pluto, the popular dwarf formerly known as a planet, has another little friend: a fifth moon, first reported early in the morning of July 11 on Twitter.
“Just announced: Pluto has some company — We've discovered a 5th moon using the Hubble Space Telescope!” tweeted Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
And it appears that more detections might be on the way. “We fully expect to discover still more moons,” says Stern, the principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission, which will fly by the dwarf planet in 2015. “Every time we look harder, we find another.”
On July 7, ace moon-finder Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., spotted the fifth moon, referred to as P5 for now, in images captured by Hubble.
“It didn’t really jump out at us until Saturday,” Showalter says. “From the time I got the data out of the Hubble archive, until the time I was staring at this thing on my computer screen, was maybe an hour at the most. I stared at it for a while and thought, ‘OK, am I ready to embarrass myself if I’ve got it wrong?’”
P5 revealed itself in 14 sets of images, each containing around a dozen three-minute exposures, according to a dispatch from the International Astronomical Union's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. Hubble has been peering at the Pluto system since June, tasked with helping astronomers detect any potential hazards to the New Horizons spacecraft. The team is hoping to have enough time to plan an alternate route through the system if the probe’s current trajectory points toward trouble.
Just a tiny little thing, P5 measures between 10 and 25 kilometers in diameter. It joins a moony menagerie that includes (comparatively) enormous Charon, the smaller satellites Nix and Hydra, and the moon-still-known-as-P4, discovered last year by Showalter. P5’s orbit spans 52,000 kilometers and lies between the orbits of Nix and Charon, making it the most interior of the smaller moons. That location, plus its small size, explains why P5 has been hard to see. “We’re looking right next to Pluto, so there’s this bright searchlight that we have to deal with,” Stern says.
It’s not just finding another Plutonian moon that’s exciting the team. The system’s architecture is configured so that the smaller moons have orbital periods that are neatly related to Charon’s.
Charon orbits Pluto in about 6.5 days. P5 takes roughly three times that long. Nix? Four times. P4’s Pluto-year is five times as long as Charon’s, and Hydra’s is six. “The way these things are spaced in a uniform way — there’ s a story in that, but we don’t know what it is yet,” Showalter says.
As for the name? The team is undecided — and will be for a while, as they’re planning on waiting until they know just how many more moons Pluto might have before suggesting names. “If we’re naming them as a group, we’ll just handle it a little differently,” Stern says.
Showalter says he’s been mulling over some possibilities for and P4 and P5 based on Pluto’s namesake, the Greek god of the underworld. “The Greeks were such great story tellers,” he says. “There is one I’d sort of looked at — the story of Orpheus, the only human to ever go into Hades and come back. He went in to rescue his wife Eurydice, so one possibility would be to name these two moons Orpheus and Eurydice.”[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342193/title/Hubble_spots_fifth_Pluto_moon"]Source[/URL]
[B]Pluto's Moons: Five and Counting[/B]
[QUOTE]It's hard to believe, but the arrival of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at Pluto is just three years away. The logistics of the high-speed flyby, already challenging, just got more complicated: Pluto turns out to have a fifth moon.
Although for now its official designation is S/2012 (134340) 1 — "134340" being the minor-planet number assigned to Pluto — the new find has been nicknamed "P5". (Easier to remember, don't you agree?) Its existence was announced last night by the IAU's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams.
Long-time Pluto-watcher Mark Showalter (SETI Institute) led the nine-member discovery team. They took advantage of Pluto's opposition on June 29th, when this little world was a mere 31¼ astronomical units (2.9 billion miles) away, to image the system five times from June 26th to July 9th with the Hubble Space Telescope and its Wide Field Camera 3.
"Here's an interesting stat," Showalter notes. "P5 is 1 arcsecond from Pluto and fainter by a factor of 100,000. I continue to be amazed at what Hubble can do with fine-tuned observations."
Yet even with HST's powerful optics, P5 shows up as barely a blip. Its magnitude is just 27, which puts its diameter somewhere between 6 and 15 miles (10 and 25 km), depending on the reflectivity of its surface. The orbit is still uncertain, though the tiny moonlet appears to be circling in the same plane as Pluto's other satellites and roughly 26,000 miles (42,000 km) out. That puts P5 nearer to Pluto than Nix, Hydra, and the not-yet-named P4 (discovered last year) though not nearly as close as Charon.
It's no coincidence that all these moons orbit in the same plane as Pluto's equator. Most likely they formed from debris tossed out when a renegade object struck Pluto long ago. Collisions in this distant region of the solar system are typically so slow that most of the resulting fragments couldn't have reached escape velocity, which is a bit under 1 mile per second for Pluto. So most of it would have stuck around.
But that doesn't automatically lead to satellite formation. Ballistically speaking, any stuff that lingered should just have just fallen back onto Pluto itself. However, tidal interactions among the most massive chunks could have allowed enough of them to remain in orbit to form Charon and the other moons.
What's driving the search for Pluto's extended family is the possibility that such small objects or even rings might pose a danger to New Horizons as it zooms through the system at 32,000 miles per hour (14.3 km per second) on July 14, 2015. Plans now call for the spacecraft to pass well inside Charon's, at a point about 6,000 miles from Pluto.
"We have been searching for hazards because this is the last chance to observe Pluto before the team has to settle on the backup flyby trajectory," explains Showalter. "Searching for new, interesting targets is just a fringe benefit."[/QUOTE]
[URL="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/Plutos-Moons-Five-and-Counting-162062385.html"]Source[/URL]
pluto's got a buddy out there for him
And then Obi-Wan was relieved.
I can just tell someone is going to yell out "BUT PLUTO ISNT A PLANET!!!!!!!!!"
BUT PLUTO ISNT A PLANET!!!!!!!!!
[QUOTE=Reds;36723191]BUT PLUTO ISNT A PLANET!!!!!!!!![/QUOTE]
jokes like that are overused now
neat
Pluto gets all the bitches
Dammit, it has 5 moons, let's call it a fucking planet already.
Pluto's such a badass moon that other moons are following it around to see how they should roll
[QUOTE=Jewish Paladin;36723338]Dammit, it has 5 moons, let's call it a fucking planet already.[/QUOTE]
That means it didn't clear its orbit yet thus not meeting the criteria for planets
Give up planet scrubs
That's pretty cool that we're still finding moons on objects in our solar system. You think that we would have found them all already, but I guess not.
[QUOTE=Jewish Paladin;36723338]Dammit, it has 5 moons, let's call it a fucking planet already.[/QUOTE]
If Pluto's a planet then Eris is a planet.
One day Pluto will go "dwarf planet eh? How's this motherfuckers" and collide with all its moons
It's plotting.
looks more like a bunch of planets hanging around. Seriously, those moons are almost as big as pluto.
[url=http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Charon_Relay]I don't think it's a moon...[/url]
[QUOTE=JgcxCub;36723499][url=http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Charon_Relay]I don't think it's a moon...[/url][/QUOTE]
You miss the fact that it was discovered inside the moon Charon.
[QUOTE=ZombieDawgs;36723328]Pluto gets all the bitches[/QUOTE]
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Jupiter_moons_anim.gif[/img]
Bitch, please.
I can't wait for the mapping satellite to finish it's 10 year journey to Pluto
And now, we're still discovering new shit within our Solar System.
[QUOTE=shian;36723683]And now, we're still discovering new shit within our Solar System.[/QUOTE]Reading that gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. That's sweet, awww.
[QUOTE=CabooseRvB;36723628][img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Jupiter_moons_anim.gif[/img]
Bitch, please.[/QUOTE]
jupiter is so boss it has a moon called "megaclit", wow.
[QUOTE=DesolateGrun;36723441]That means it didn't clear its orbit yet thus not meeting the criteria for planets
Give up planet scrubs[/QUOTE]
Earth didn't clear its orbit either then. Guess we don't live on a planet.
[QUOTE=JgcxCub;36723499][url=http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Charon_Relay]I don't think it's a moon...[/url][/QUOTE]I never understood how the hell they fit that gigantic thing in such a tiny moon.
[QUOTE=Killer900;36723993]I never understood how the hell they fit that gigantic thing in such a tiny moon.[/QUOTE]
Charon is larger than the Relays are. The Relay was encased in Ice.
If they have the instruments to show that Pluto has five moons then why can't they explain why all that shit is circling Uranus?
[QUOTE=Jurikuer;36723981]Earth didn't clear its orbit either then. Guess we don't live on a planet.[/QUOTE]
Earth has cleared its orbit. The amount of debris in our orbit as a percentage of our mass is negligible.
However, the amount of debris and stuff in Pluto's orbit is greater than the planet itself. Pluto is constantly getting bombarded with tons of shit. It's still sweeping up tons of debris.
Not only that, but it is actually an unremarkable object. There are several other dwarf planets around Pluto that are larger than it. It's in what is basically an asteroid belt. Should we call asteroids planets?
I only thought there was 1 moon, Charon
I need to keep up with astronomy more
So is this like... Pluto's crew? Its gang? Did it decide that since it's not a planet it needs a posse to beat down all its "hataz" like a rapper?
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
