Pluto may have got romantic to capture its largest moon, colliding and engaging in a passionate but icy 10 hour kiss with Charon billions of years ago.

The icy volcanism of Charon may be caused by its internal ocean freezing, expanding, and cracking the outer shell of the moon if it was thinner than expected. When you purchase through links on ...

Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.

Pluto's largest moon, Charon. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute) Labroots recently explored Saturn’s sponge-like moon, Hyperion, with its ...

Pluto and its moon Charon may have been briefly locked together in a cosmic “kiss”, before the dwarf planet released the smaller body and recaptured it in its orbit.

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 for a moon.

Charon is the largest of Pluto’s five moons, stretching at 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) across while the dwarf planet itself measures at 1,400 miles (2,253 km) wide.

By Ashley Strickland, CNN (CNN) — For decades, astronomers have tried to determine how Pluto acquired its unusually large moon Charon, which is about half the size of the dwarf planet.

NASA’s New Horizons space probe flew by Pluto and Charon back in 2015. But there were still many questions unanswered about the former planet and its moon.

Pluto and Charon are somewhat of a celestial odd couple — Charon’s radius is just about half the size of Pluto, making it abnormally large for a moon — but researchers uncovered new observations about ...

Unlike most moons, Charon is almost half the size of Pluto, so they actually orbit around a point in space between them, almost like they're twin planets.

For decades, astronomers have tried to determine how Pluto acquired its unusually large moon Charon, which is about half the size of the dwarf planet. Now, new research suggests that Pluto and ...