New research suggests that Pluto captured its largest moon, Charon, billions of years ago in a brief, icy 'kiss.' The two bodies grazed each other, briefly merging before separating to form the binary system we see today. This 'kiss-and-capture' process offers a new theory for moon formation and could help scientists better understand the structural strength of icy worlds in the Kuiper Belt.
Pluto and its largest moon Charon could have come together via a 10-hour “kiss-and-capture” encounter after a grazing collisionNASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
"We've found that if we assume that Pluto and Charon are bodies with material strength, Pluto can indeed capture Charon from a," team leader and University of Arizona lunar and planetary researcher Adeene Denton told Space.com."The process of this collisional capture is called 'kiss-and-capture' because Pluto and Charon briefly merge, the 'kiss' element, before separating to form two independent bodies.
That means that the prevailing theory of the formation of the Pluto and Charon system is based on the collisional capture idea, similar to how a massive body is believed to have slammed into Earth to launch out material that, we don't fully know how that works and the conditions under which that occurs," Denton said.
"The 'kiss' in this kiss-and-capture, the merger is very brief, geologically speaking, lasting for 10 to 15 hours before both bodies separate again," Denton said."The team thinks the initial collision happened very early in solar system history, probably tens of millions of years after the solar system formed, which would be billions of years ago.
Pluto Charon Moon Formation Collision Kuiper Belt
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