Possible New Moons Orbiting Pluto
Date: 30 October 2005
Satellite: Hubble Space Telescope
Depicts: Pluto, Charon and candidate moons
Copyright: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU/APL), A. Stern (SwRI), and the Hubble Space Telescope Pluto Companion Search Team
These Hubble Space Telescope images, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, reveal Pluto, its large moon Charon, and the planet's two new candidate satellites. Between 15 May and 18 May, 2005, Charon, and the putative moons, provisionally designated P1 and P2, all appear to rotate counter-clockwise around Pluto. P1 and P2 move less than Charon because they are farther from Pluto, and therefore would be orbiting at slower speeds.
P1 and P2 are thousands of times less bright than Pluto and Charon. The enhanced-colour images of Pluto (the brightest object) and Charon (to the right of Pluto) were constructed by combining short exposure images taken in filters near 475 nanometres (blue) and 555 nanometres (green-yellow). The images of the new satellites were made from longer exposures taken in a single filter centred near 606 nanometres (yellow), so no colour information is available for them.