The story behind Plutos huge moon bodes well for distant ocean worlds

Unlike how scientists believe Earth's moon formed billions of years ago, Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon, didn't have a messy breakup. New computer simulations show the primitive dwarf planet and the object that struck it likely had an unforeseen kind of cosmic collision. Scientists usually classify planetary crashes as either hit-and-runs or graze-and-merges: One planet or rock swipes another and then keeps on trucking, or a thing smacks into another thing, and they mix together as one. But what a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Southwestern Research Institute found was something quite different — a so-called "kiss-and-capture" scenario. When Pluto and Charon hit, they may have stuck together, rotating through space as one unit until they pushed against each other, according to a new study, sending the moon into a stable orbit. Neither would have lost too much of its original material in the process. The incident could have created enough heat for Pluto to form an underground ocean, Adeene Denton, the lead researcher, told Mashable. It's an intriguing implication, supporting existing predictions that Pluto is hiding water under its icy shell. These findings were published in the journal Nature Geoscience. SEE ALSO: NASA finds Earth's moon didn't need hundreds of years to form. Try hours. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon, together. Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute Since New Horizons' close encounter with Pluto 10 years ago, experts have come to think of the dwarf planet as much more scientifically valuable. Rather than a cold, featureless ball on the fringes of the solar system, the spacecraft images revealed a geologically diverse world, with mountains, ice sheets, pits, cliffs, cracks, and valleys. Charon, its biggest of five moons, was discovered in 1978 by the U.S. Naval Observatory. At about 750 miles wide, it's half the size of Pluto — extremely large