‘Raises a lot of interesting questions’
They needed some space.
New research suggests Pluto may have had a “kiss” with its largest moon billions of years ago in a harmless collision.
The report, published in “Nature Geoscience,” describes how the minuscule dwarf planet could lure in Charon, a space rock nearly half its size, to orbit.
Pluto and its moon Charon possibly “kissed” billions of years ago, a new report shows. Elenarts – stock.adobe.com
The authors suggest that Pluto and Charon, located in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system, collided without annihilating one another before being influenced by one another’s gravitational pull.
After getting intimate, they began spinning like a “cosmic snowman” and remained linked in orbit after separating thanks to their “kiss and capture,” according to Space.com.
Pluto and Charon’s reported connected is unprecedented. Pavel – stock.adobe.com
“We’ve found that if we assume that Pluto and Charon are bodies with material strength, Pluto can indeed capture Charon from a giant impact,” research leader Adeene Denton told the outlet.
“The process of this collisional capture is called ‘kiss-and-capture’ because Pluto and Charon briefly merge, the ‘kiss’ element, before separating to form two independent bodies.”
Denton added that the romantic metaphor isn’t for dramatic effect. He admitted that the team was “definitely surprised” that two massive entities delicately collided and split apart harmoniously.
Still, many questions remain on how the mass that ultimately became Charon could do so.
“Something big hits Pluto, and you get Charon, but like with the Earth-moon system, we don’t fully know how that works and the conditions under which that occurs,” Denton said.
There are still many questions on how Charon, the moon of Pluto could collide with the dwarf planet and not cause catastrophe. Claudio Caridi – stock.adobe.com
“It’s a pretty big question since a bunch of other large Kuiper Belt Objects also have large moons, so it seems like this happens in the Kuiper Belt with some frequency, but we don’t know how or why.”
Denton believes the “kiss and capture” was about ten to 15 hours of planetary passion before they separated. Ultimately, their properties resulted in Charon rotating at a rate slower than Pluto, leading to their parting.
“Typical large collisions are straightforward mergers, where the bodies combine, or both bodies remain independent,” he added.
“So this was very new to us. It also raised a lot of interesting geological questions that we’d like to test.”
Pluto and Charon may hold a great deal of information on the far reaches of our solar system. Robert Melikyan and Adeene Denton
Along with learning more about the formation of oceans on Pluto and Charon, Denton seeks to see how the principles at play affect other Kuiper Belt objects, such as the dwarf planets Eris and Orcus and their respective moons Dysnomia and Vanth.
“I’d really like to determine how the initial Pluto-Charon impact can influence whether and how Pluto and Charon develop oceans,” he said.
“Our initial analysis suggests that kiss-and-capture can also be the source of these other systems,” Denton theorized. “But since they’re all different in their compositions and mass, it’s critical to learn how kiss-and-capture may have operated across the Kuiper Belt.”
