Free Republic

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...