REAL LIFE NEWS: PLUTO HAS YET ANOTHER MOON
by Hazed
Poor little Pluto, demoted from planet status a few years ago, has another moon: the fifth to be discovered orbitting the dwarf planet.
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the irregularly shaped lump, about 6 to 15 miles across. Its orbit is in a plane 58,000 miles around Pluto.
It rejoices in the snappy name S/2012 (134340) 1, or P5 for short, and joins Charon, Nix, Hydra and P4 in “a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls,” as team leader Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in California said.
In a couple of years, the New Horizons space probe will be visiting Pluto so the telescope is being used to check out its prospective path, to make sure it won’t crash into anything, because at its speed of over 30,000 miles per hour the smallest impact could prove fatal.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/11/hubble_pluto_moon_fifth/
