When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Credit: NASA/Robert Lea (created with Canva) New research suggests that billions of years ago, ...

The icy volcanism of Charon may be caused by its internal ocean freezing, expanding, and cracking the outer shell of the moon if it was thinner than expected. When you purchase through links on our ...

New research suggests that billions of years ago, Pluto may have captured its largest moon, Charon, with a very brief icy "kiss." The theory could explain how the dwarf planet (yeah, we wish Pluto was ...

A full view of Pluto's crescent, captured by NASA's New Horizons team on July 14, 2015, as the spacecraft looked back at Pluto toward the sun. (NASA) (CN) — The question of how Pluto captured its moon ...

Eons ago, in the frigid depths of our solar system, a dramatic collision occurred between two icy worlds. Instead of a catastrophic smash-up, the two bodies “kissed,” merging temporarily like a ...

Labroots recently explored Saturn’s sponge-like moon, Hyperion, with its deep craters and non-spherical shape. This moon is an example of how the Universe and the laws of astrophysics work in both ...

This composite of enhanced color images that NASA’s New Horizons mission took when it flew near Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left) on July 14, 2015. While Pluto and Charon’s true separation ...

In a paper published today in Nature, a team of U.S. scientists led by Dr. S. Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), concludes that two newly discovered small moons of Pluto were very ...

planet Pluto to help compute a better ephemeris for this distant object. Astronomer James W. Christy had noticed that a number of the images of Pluto appeared elongated, but images of background stars ...

The icy volcanism of Pluto's large moon Charon and a belt of fractures across its surface may have been caused by a subsurface frozen ocean bursting through a thin ice shell. New models suggest that ...

Pluto and Charon’s meet-cute may have started with a kiss. New computer simulations of the dwarf planet and its largest moon suggest that the pair got together in a “kiss-and-capture” collision, where ...

Pluto and its moon Charon may have been briefly locked together in a cosmic “kiss”, before the dwarf planet released the smaller body and recaptured it in its orbit. Charon is the largest of Pluto’s ...