Pluto may have caught his moon Charon with a kiss

Pluto’s meeting and Charon may have started with a kiss. The new computer simulations of the planet Dwarf and its largest moon suggest that the pair joined in a “kiss and clip” collision, where both bodies briefly joined before they were placed in their current positions.

“It’s a U-Haul situation,” says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of the Southwestern Research Institute at Boulder, Colo., Who reports the results on January 6 Geoscience. “They kiss and they say,” Yes, that’s it. I want to build a system along with you. ‘And then they do. ”

In the size of half Pluto and 12 percent of its mass, Charon is an extremely large moon. Since the 1990s, planetary scientists have thought that Charon could have been formed in a way similar to Earth’s moon: an impact on the main body sprinkle the melted hot material in orbit, where it finally joined in a large natural satellite .

But as with the earth’s moon, the details are unclear. “Go, something hit Pluto, question mark question marks, Charon is now there,” Denton says.

Computer simulations of such clashes seemed to result in a system like Pluto and Charon. But those simulations treated the icy, icy protoplays as liquids, ignoring their material strength. This is a good assumption for large objects such as gas giants or galaxies, which behave like liquids when something strikes them. But Pluto and Charon are rocks wrapped in ice. And it turns out that you can’t ignore it.

The real collision would have been much less sprinkled, Denton says. She and her colleagues developed the clash simulations that included Pluto’s rock nuclei and Charon and Charon and icy and crustal coats. The team revealed that the protoplanets had an immediate connection.

The Pairier joined and rolled together, but each body remained essentially intact. After about 30 hours of contact, Charon separated from Pluto and began migrating to the orbit he has today.

Denton and colleagues revealed that two other pairs of objects, planet Dwarf Eris and his moon dysnomy and Orcus Dwarf Planet and its moon vanth, can also be explained by the “Kiss-And-Capture” clashes. It plans to extend work to other objects with different measures and compositions.

“Can this still work? I’m very sure she does, “she says.” If this is true, the kiss and catch occurred across the Quiper belt in the history of the solar system. It is very romantic. ”