Will Pluto bounce back into the big league of planets with the fifth moon?

In the recent memory, there has been a new scientific discovery, which revealed that a fifth moon has been orbiting around former planet Pluto. The Hubble Space Telescope, which stays in the low earth orbit, disclosed the news on Wednesday, July 11.

Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado tweeted about this discovery of new moon in the vicinity of Pluto. He stated: "Just announced: Pluto has some company — we’ve discovered a 5th moon using the Hubble Space Telescope!"

Stern is the same guy who is working on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft that will head to Pluto in the next couple of years. That will be the first assignment ever to visit Pluto. 

Pluto was formerly regarded as the ninth planet in the universe until 2006 when the International Astronomical Union disbanded it from the big leagues. Back then Pluto was accompanied by four moons. However, the researchers have found a fifth moon that is
likely to called P5.

Hence, the new moon P5 joins Charon, Nix, Hydra, and P4 in orbit around Pluto. By the look of it, P5 is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across, and it is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around.

According a statement by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), Pluto has more in common with the other icy planetoids and asteroids orbiting with it in the "Kuiper Belt" beyond Neptune, the IAU said, than with Saturn, Uranus and Earth.

So the question arises! Will Pluto bounce back in the big leagues after the discovery of another moon? It is also believed that there must be a plenty of other small particles lurking unseen in the Pluto system

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Posted by Irfan Khokhar on Jul 12 2012. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry