Washington, July 21 (ANI): While searching for rings around Pluto using the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA astronomers have discovered a fourth moon circling the dwarf planet.
The new moon, dubbed P4 for now, is the smallest discovered around Pluto.
It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).
"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.
The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015.
"This is a fantastic discovery. Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby," said New Horizons' principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra.
The dwarf planet's entire moon system is believed to have formed by a collision between Pluto and another planet-sized body early in the history of the solar system.
"This surprising observation is a powerful reminder of Hubble's ability as a general purpose astronomical observatory to make astounding, unintended discoveries," said Jon Morse, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. (ANI)
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