When Pluto met Charon, there was an instant connection, new simulations suggest.
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, where the two bodies briefly joined up before settling into their current positions.
At half Pluto’s size and 12 percent of its mass, Charon is an unusually large moon. Since the 1990s, planetary scientists have thought that Charon could have Computer simulations of such collisions seemed to result in a system like Pluto and Charon. But those simulations treated the rocky, icy protoplanets as fluids, ignoring their material strength. That’s a decent assumption for large objects like gas giants or galaxies, which do behave like fluids when something hits them. But Pluto and Charon are ice-wrapped rocks. And it turns out you can’t ignore that.
The real collision would have been a lot less splashy, Denton says. She and her colleagues ran collision simulations that included Pluto’s and Charon’s rocky cores and icy mantles and crusts. The team found that the protoplanets had an instant connection.
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