Pluto (right) and his Charon Moon, photographed by the NASA New Horizons probe in 2015 in 2015
NASA / JHUAPL / Swri
Pluto and his Charon Moon may have been briefly locked together in a cosmic “kiss”, before the dwarf planet published the smallest body and takes it up on its orbit.
Charon is the largest of the five moons of Pluto, with a radius more than half of that of Pluto himself, but the question of how it came in orbit Pluto perplexed astronomers.
A important theory suggests that Charon formed after a large object broken in pluto, spitting debris in space which then formed Charon, similar to How scientists think that the moon of the earth has formed. But the large size of Charon and the near orbit, eight times wider than Pluto itself, make it a scenario difficult to explain.
NOW, Adeene Denton At the University of Arizona and his colleagues proposed that Charon has a history of less destructive origin, which they describe as a “kiss and capture”.
Anterior simulations have treated Pluto and Charon as fluids – a hypothesis that works during the modeling of collisions between larger bodies. But recent research has shown that with lighter mass objects than the Moon of the Earth, the material strength of their composition influences the result. “Pluto and Charon are quite small, so the hypothesis that they are fluid bodies probably no longer applies,” explains Denton.
The researchers directed simulations which take into account the compositions of Rock and Ice of Pluto and Charon, and found that a more likely scenario involved a gentle collage and manners of separation.
Their model has shown that a proto-charon can have penetrated the icy shell of a proto-pluto and that the two bodies would have turned quickly for about 10 hours. Finally, the spinning rejected the Charon and he settled on the orbit of Pluto.
“I had always assumed that any collision between the planetary bodies which were hundreds of kilometers would destroy the smallest, if he was captured,” said David Rothery at the open university, in the United Kingdom.
Although the scenario of kissing and capturing is interesting, known as Rothery, it will also have to explain the complex geological characteristics observed on Pluto and Charon, such as highly crazy surfaces and frozen volcanism, which it does not currently do.
