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Charon (moon)
Charon, discovered in 1978, is, depending on the definition employed, either the largest moon of Pluto or one member of a double dwarf planet with Pluto being the other member. With the discovery in 2005 of two other moons of Pluto (Nix and Hydra), Charon is now also referred to as Pluto I. The New Horizons mission is scheduled to visit Charon and Pluto in July 2015. Charon was discovered by astronomer James Christy on June 22, 1978 when he was examining highly magnified images of Pluto on photographic plates taken a couple of months before. Christy noticed that a slight bulge appeared periodically. Later, the bulge was confirmed on plates dating back to April 29, 1965.
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Space & Time News
July 19, 2026
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July 18, 2026 A catastrophic asteroid breakup may have triggered a huge wave of impacts across the inner solar system about 800 million years ago. The debris was launched from near a gravitational gateway controlled by Jupiter, sending fragments toward Earth, the ...
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July 14, 2026 K2-18b is one of the most promising worlds for the search for extraterrestrial life, so astronomers conducted an unusually powerful radio survey using both the VLA and MeerKAT telescopes. Advanced ...
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July 14, 2026 NASA is ramping up its lunar ambitions by awarding nearly $600 million for four commercial Moon landings planned for late 2028. Each mission will carry the same trio of science instruments to improve lunar navigation, study dangerous dust kicked up ...
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July 8, 2026 Researchers have created an AI-based simulation that makes it much faster to model how neutron star mergers produce many of the universe's heaviest elements. The new tool could improve predictions of these powerful explosions while helping ...
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July 19, 2026 Researchers have created cosmic dust from scratch by recreating space-like conditions inside glass tubes. The dust contains complex carbon-rich molecules built from elements essential to life and ...
July 17, 2026 JWST has captured unusually detailed images of gas feeding the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4696. A vast filament appears to funnel material into an 800-light-year-wide spinning disk, ...
July 16, 2026 A distant Sun-like star appears to have devoured one of its planets, leaving behind a surprising chemical fingerprint. Researchers found an unusually high concentration of lithium, a strong sign that ...
July 15, 2026 NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has revealed new details about the blistering lava planet 55 Cancri e, where temperatures are high enough to melt ...
July 15, 2026 Four nearby white dwarf stars have been discovered hiding in plain sight beside brighter red dwarf companions. Hubble's ultraviolet observations finally revealed the long-hidden stellar remnants, ...
July 13, 2026 Dark matter may be far more complicated than scientists once believed. A new study suggests it could consist of at least two different kinds of particles that slowly separate over time, with heavier ...
July 13, 2026 Scientists have developed a new framework that could finally apply the laws of thermodynamics to real, ever-changing black holes instead of only perfectly stable ones. The advance may improve our ...
July 12, 2026 A new study suggests spacecraft exhaust could quickly contaminate the moon's most scientifically valuable regions, potentially masking ancient clues about how life began on Earth. Researchers say ...
July 9, 2026 What if time doesn't actually exist until something changes? Scientists at the University of Birmingham created a tiny "mini universe" using 24,000 ultracold atoms and showed that the flow of time ...
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