Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.

"We were definitely surprised by the 'kiss' part of kiss-and-capture. There hasn't really been a kind of impact before where the two bodies only temporarily merge before re-separating!" ...

Rhoden and Denton both began working through the NASA Astrobiology Postdoctoral Program in September, but Rhoden was not part of the Pluto study. Some scientists suspect an ocean could lie beneath ...

The biggest stories of the day delivered to your inbox.

This composite image of Pluto, right, and Charon, its largest moon, showcases photos captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Unlike how scientists ...

Summer 2015 was marked by a unique astronomical event, which occurs approximately once in ... the history of astronomy. The ...

Researchers accounted for the previously overlooked structures of the dwarf planet and moon in computer simulations of a ...

Charon is half the size of Pluto, “making it the largest known moon relative to its parent planet in our solar system,” NASA notes. So how did Pluto get its chonky companion? A new study ...

A new study has proposed that Pluto captured Charon via a 'kiss'—rather than a catastrophic collision like the one that formed Earth's moon. NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI In their study, Denton and ...

NASA Pluto Solar System Get the best tech, science, and culture news in your inbox daily. NASA’s Deep Space Mission Control Is Empty for the First Time in 6 Decades as L.A. Wildfires Rage "It ...

Styx is also the name for one of the smaller moons in the Pluto system, and the others (Nix, Kerberos and Hydra) also have connections to the underworld mythology. According to NASA, Christy also ...