Posted on 01/12/2025 11:35:53 AM PST by SunkenCiv
The "demoted" dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon make an unusual pair, and for decades, scientists have been discussing how the binary system—in which each mutually orbits the other—came to be. With Charon being half Pluto's size, experts have struggled to explain how it ended up in the dwarf planet's domain.
Now, a team of researchers has suggested that Pluto may have secured Charon through a newly described "kiss and capture" mechanism... Their work was published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
The new theory suggests that billions of years ago, Pluto and Charon collided in the far reaches of the outer solar system. Rather than obliterating each other, the two bodies joined together in a spinning snowman shape (the kiss) for 10 to 15 hours before separating—but ultimately, they remained trapped in each other's orbits (the capture). Despite the collision, the dwarf planet and moon would have remained mostly intact...
Previously, scientists suggested Charon had formed through another scenario: A celestial body catastrophically smashed into Pluto, generating a massive amount heat from the impact that would have made the bodies behave in a fluid-like manner, like silly putty or blobs in a lava lamp. Scientists widely agree that Earth's moon formed in a similar way...
"Because Pluto is rotating rapidly prior to the collision, and because Charon lies mostly outside of their corotation zone, it is able to 'push' Charon off, and Charon starts to slowly migrate out," Denton tells the Guardian's Nicola Davis. She adds that the impact could have marked the start of a new geological era for Pluto, whose surface we observed in 2015 with the New Horizons space probe.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
The Moon contributes half the tides on Earth, despite having a mere one percent of Earth’s mass. The other half comes from the Sun, despite the distance, because the Sun has so much more mass than all the planets and everything else known to orbit it. So, no, the Sun doesn’t orbit the planets. All such bodies have influence on the motion of all the others, but the impact is often very tiny.
Pluto's sufficient isolated that it has a pretty broad sphere of influence, so theoretically capture of even a large body such as Charon should be somewhat easy. The only reason it doesn't have more known satellites is probably due to the fact that there's nothin' much out there. Isolation is a hundred-edged sword. :^)
(from the FRchives) The demotion of Pluto was a political act by a supposedly scientific org, was a gratuitous and unnecessary action, carried out to belittle the US. IMHO of course. I'll stick with David Levy's view:
"To Pluto And Far Beyond" By David H. Levy, Parade, January 15, 2006 -- We don't have a dictionary definition yet that includes all the contingencies. In the wake of the new discovery, however, the International Astronomical Union has set up a group to develop a workable definition of planet. For our part, in consultation with several experienced planetary astronomers, Parade offers this definition: A planet is a body large enough that, when it formed, it condensed under its own gravity to be shaped like a sphere. It orbits a star directly and is not a moon of another planet.
It appears that Pluto has a LOT more specific orbital energy than Neptune. It would be hard to imagine a mechanism that would provide the additional energy? If it was a moon something would have had to supply escape energy from Neptune + the excess energy to assume a more distant orbit from the sun. A passing star doesn't seem to help, because it would affect Neptune and Pluto the same way. Maybe a collision with an Ort cloud object?
There are supposed to a number of "plutinos", objects in orbital resonance with Neptune, but much smaller than Pluto, the largest Plutino.
10 X 15 hours... Pffft. My calculations say 18 hours.
No, ‘they’ work on this stuff based on known data.
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