Official News page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: PLUTO HAS ANOTHER MOON

by Hazed

It may have been demoted from its former status as a planet, but Pluto has now been shown to have another moon. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope found a new satellite orbiting the icy dwarf planet, bringing the total discovered so far to four.

The new moon has been given the temporary name P4, and with an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles it's the smallest of the four. Charon, the largest, is 648 miles across.

Hubble has been used to map Pluto's surface and search for satellites in preparation for the New Horizons spacecraft which is scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo, who is on the New Horizons team, said, "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/pluto-moon.html

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