The Hubble Space Telescope, from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), has discovered a new moon around Pluto . The dwarf planet’s fourth natural satellite, provisionally named P4 , is the smallest ever found orbiting it.
The team of researchers, which was looking for possible rings around the planet, estimates that this tiny satellite has a diameter of between 13 and 34 kilometers in diameter. The news has been released by a team of astrophysicists from the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
The small moon was sighted thanks to a photograph taken by the Wide Angle Camera 3 of the Space Telescope on June 28 and confirmed in two other photographs taken on July 3 and 18. This new satellite that completes its orbit around Pluto every 31 days thus joins the Plutonian satellites Charon, which was sighted for the first time in 1978, Nix and Hydra, also discovered in 2005 by the Hubble Telescope.
This system of Pluto moons, according to the researchers, could have been formed by a collision between the planet and a body of similar size at some point in the origin of the Solar System.
The finding will surely be very useful to support the mission that will bring NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to the surface of Pluto , which is scheduled to arrive in 2015 . Alan Stern, from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder (Colorado, USA), the mission’s principal investigator, described the discovery of P4 as “fantastic”, noting that “now that we know that there is a new moon on Pluto, we will be able to plan observations of more than close while we fly over it. “
