This close up look at Pluto and Charon, taken as part of the mission's latest optical navigation ("OpNav") campaign from Jan. 25-31, 2015, comes from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on ...

Pluto's largest moon, Charon, likely formed through a capture event in the early, crowded Kuiper Belt. Three-body encounters and tidal forces allowed Charon to lose energy and become permanently bound ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio feature on the surface of Pluto. | Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins ...

Earth has a newly-discovered neighbor in the solar system. But the heavenly body – possibly a dwarf planet à la Pluto – isn't a frequent visitor. Located beyond Neptune, its extreme orbit ...

Since Pluto is located so far from the sun, it takes around 248 Earth years for Pluto to orbit the sun. Pluto's orbit around the sun is not only a very long journey, it's also elliptical, resembling a ...

A full view of Pluto's crescent, captured by NASA's New Horizons team on July 14, 2015, as the spacecraft looked back at Pluto toward the sun. (NASA) (CN) — The question of how Pluto captured its moon ...

The year was 2015. After traveling billions and billions of miles through the Erebus, New Horizons encounters the boatman, and the somber lord of the departed. The spacecraft could have been called ...

For billions of years, Pluto and its largest moon Charon have been facing each other in a mutual tidal lock. Since it’s about half the size of Pluto, the moon and its planet are sometimes referred to ...

An amateur astronomer discovered Pluto 95 years ago today. The former planet will complete an orbit in another 153 years. On February 18, 1930, just two weeks after his 24th birthday, Clyde Tombaugh ...

University of Maryland astronomers Silvia Protopapa and Douglas Hamilton are among the authors of the first published paper from the New Horizons flyby, which appears in the Oct. 16, 2015, issue of ...