"We were definitely surprised by the 'kiss' part of kiss-and-capture. There hasn't really been a kind of impact before where the two bodies only temporarily merge before re-separating!" ...

This composite image of Pluto, right, and Charon, its largest moon, showcases photos captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Unlike how scientists ...

Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.

Scientists have discovered a new type of planetary collision called “kiss-and-capture,” where Pluto and proto-Charon briefly ...

Researchers accounted for the previously overlooked structures of the dwarf planet and moon in computer simulations of a ...

Charon also has an abnormally circular orbit of Pluto, with its orbital eccentricity (a value between 0 and 1, where 0 is a perfect circle and 1 is an open-ended parabola) only being about 0.000161.

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Credit: NASA/Robert Lea (created with Canva) 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 ...

New research suggests that Pluto may have acquired its most massive moon, Charon, through an ancient grazing impact, which the science team refers to as a “kiss and capture”. The study uses ...

Pluto may have got romantic to capture its largest moon, colliding and engaging in a passionate but icy 10 hour kiss with Charon billions of years ago. When you purchase through links on our site ...