I am doing a project on pluto for my science class and I found out today that Pluto has 3 moons! (the other one is charon, which is almost half the size of Pluto, very large in proportion to it's planet)
Two additional moons were imaged by astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope on May 15, 2005, and received provisional designations of S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2. They were confirmed with "precovery" Hubble images from June 14, 2002, and follow-up observations were made in February and March 2006.
The small moons orbit Pluto at two and three times the distance of Charon: P2 at 49,000 km and P1 at 65,000 km from the barycenter of the system. They have nearly circular prograde orbits in the same orbital plane as Charon, and are very close to 4:1 and 6:1 orbital resonances with Charon.
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It must be the Life Star then!:dOriginally posted by Baker
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Strange Facts From Wikipedia
Wikipedia is on my short list of the best things that ever happened to the internet. Sure everyone can contribute to it, so you can't exactly take every little single fact to the "bank", but they have a thorough review process so most things are reasonably accurate.
And they have better more up to date information than any other encyclopedia site, plus it's free.
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Here are a couple of strange facts/things I found on Wikipedia:
Mimas, the moon of Saturn, looks like the Death Star. Except for being white.
And a second one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triton_%28moon%29
Triton, a large moon of Neptune, is orbiting the wrong way around Neptune and as a result, the orbit is degrading and the moon's orbit will eventually take it very close to Neptune where it will be destroyed.
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