Moons as in plural. The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the presence of the newly discovered moons of Pluto. Hubble first discovered the moons May 2005, and the team looked at the Pluto system closer last week in an effort to see if they could detect additional satellites and to characterize the orbits of the moons.

It isn’t the team really doubted the findings of last May, but the sighting does confirm the locations predicted during that initial observation. The confirmation also reinforces a view of the Kuiper Belt that it is much more than a bunch of rocks and icy bodies.

It turns out the orbits of the newly discovered moons are in the same plane as Charon, which was discovered in 1978. This probably means the moons were born along with Charon and not captured by Pluto’s gravity. Some theories suggest the there was a humongous collision between two Pluto-sized objects over 4 billion years ago and that collision created the moons. In a related story, a paper published yesterday in Nature, seems to suggest it is possible the small moons orbiting Pluto may generate debris rings around Pluto.

Rings around Pluto, go figure.

Click the image above for a non-annotated version of the image.

Credit: Hubble, NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory), A. Stern (Southwest Research Institute) and the HST Pluto Companion Search Team

A quick apology of sorts is in order too. A couple of posts ago incorrectly characterized a lunar eclipse as casting a shadow on us, when in fact it is the other way around. And it should have said a solar eclipse does. A draft got posted accidentally instead of the final, but instead of replacing the post, I just made a couple of quick edits. Thanks to Dave for spotting the error.

[tags]Pluto,Hubble,Kuiper Belt[/tags]